Specialty Gardening: Green Screen from windowboxes?, 1 by Colderwild

Colderwild wrote:
Greetings to the Container Gardeners!

I'm new to the forum, the website, and growing things in general, so I apologize in advance if I should miss something obvious...

I live in a third floor apartment in Manassas, VA - zone 6b, I think. It's got all the usual apartment amenities: parking out front, in-unit washer and dryer, and a balcony with a decent view....of the neighbors' balconies. Now admittedly, the primary view is of a densely wooded area right in back of the apartment, so it's not all bad. It's just that I've got a 5-foot-deep by 8-foot-tall opening on the western side of the balcony which is open to three other balconies, all of the neighbors' activities, and a half-dozen air conditioning units.

What I'd like to do is to grow a "green screen" between myself and my neighbors, in order to afford myself some measure of privacy, and make my balcony a nice place to relax. This would also have the practical benefits of eliminating some of the summertime glare from the afternoon sun shining on my sliding glass doors, and the accompanying rise in utility bills, as well as shielding me from a sodium light on the side of the building, about fifteen feet away. The balcony is shaded by the building for most of the day, but it gets direct sunlight in the afternoons until the sun goes behind the trees in the evening - not sure exactly how many hours of sun it gets during the days from spring to fall, but right now in the winter, I think it's getting maybe four to five hours of direct sunlight, plus the sodium light shines from dusk till dawn.

I've got a pair of windowboxes which go together to fill the five-foot depth of the balcony, and would probably make a decent base for the screen, if I could just figure out what to plant in them.

- My initial thought was to hijack some cane bamboo from a friend's place, but my ignorance and ineptitude killed it before it even made it into the planters.
- "Plan B" came from my mother, who supplied me with a number of Sweet Autumn clematis seeds, and the assurance that they would grow quickly and thickly. Unfortunately, I have since found out that Sweet Autumn clematis can be very invasive around here, with its windborne seeds taking root wherever they may land.
- The next idea was to plant pole beans, which could climb on strings or netting, but those apparently require full sun and don't fare well in containers anyway.
- Having learned a bit about bamboo since my initial experiments, I suppose that - were I to transplant it properly - I might be able to manage a fast-grower like Japanese arrow bamboo. Sure it's a running bamboo, but it would have to run awfully fast to make it from a third floor windowbox to anything it can take root in before I noticed that it was trying to escape.
- I've got some philodendron and pothos cuttings in some glasses. I suppose that I could plant some in the windowboxes, and figure out a way to hang them up high from the pair of "bicycle hooks" in the ceiling so that the philos can drape downwards over the gap, and try to get them to grow thickly enough to provide some cover, rather than getting all viney and strung out.

It may still be the middle of winter, but I figure anything that I can get started inside just gives me that much of a head start on my privacy once the weather gets warm enough to move them into place outside.

Thanks for any help or suggestions that you might be able to provide!