The Balcony Garden

Ana had always wanted a garden, though nothing in her circumstances suggested that she would ever have one. She lived in a small flat on the third floor, her work left her little spare time, and she had never successfully kept so much as a houseplant alive. Her balcony, however, caught the sun all afternoon, and one Saturday that fact proved difficult to ignore: she came home from the garden shop with a large pot, a bag of compost and a packet of tomato seeds.

Every morning before leaving for work, she watered the pot and studied the soil with a concentration she normally reserved for emails. Days passed without any sign of life. Ana began to suspect that she had buried the seeds too deeply, or perhaps drowned them, and the thought of failing at something so modest was oddly discouraging. She considered abandoning the experiment, yet she disliked the idea of having wasted both money and hope.

On the eleventh morning, a tiny green leaf pushed through the surface. Ana stared at it for a full minute before realising that she wanted to tell someone. She knocked on the door opposite, where Luis, who had been growing herbs and peppers on his own balcony for years, was having breakfast. He came out in his slippers, looked at the pot with the seriousness of an inspector and then burst into a broad smile.

“Would you like some advice?” he asked. The pot, he explained, stood in a corner where the wind dried the soil faster than she could water it. Together they carried it to a spot with plenty of sun and a little shelter, and Luis suggested that she should water in the morning rather than the evening, so that the roots would not stay damp overnight. Ana noted all of this on her phone, feeling like a student who had finally been given the syllabus.

By the end of the summer, the plant carried three red tomatoes. Ana picked one for Luis, and the two of them ate the rest on his balcony with bread and olive oil. “It is barely two metres wide,” she said, looking back at her pot, “but I think it counts as my first garden.” Luis, who knew better than anyone how much patience such a small space could demand, did not disagree.