Time again for another tour through our balcony garden. Lots of green things are sprouting (or perhaps more accurately described--growing wild...) in every container. We've been picking away at a few of the crops (like the parsley, strawberries [neither shown here]) and others are getting close. We're also making mental notes of what to include (and exclude) in our garden plans for next year.
Potatoes! The stalks are huge. We've had to prop them up they're so big (and they've been bent over in the wind). Shall I mention again how hopefull I am to have a decent crop of purple potatoes? As long as the aphids Andrew's found on the leaves don't eat up these delicious tubers before we do.
Carrots. We aren't going to continue with our carrot attempts next year. Sure, we have some stalks popping up, but they're taking a lot longer to mature than what they should and there's only about a dozen sprouts in each tub. We might replace the carrots with more potatoes, or more zucchini.
Tomatoes! No problem here. We have tons of tomatoes ripening on both these plants plus more on the two upside down, 'whimpy' tomato hangers. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with these--maybe make a tomato-pepper spaghetti sauce?
Tomatoes in varying of states of ripeness. I wish they could all ripen at once so I could do a big harvest and make something substantial. Oh well.
Blooms on the beans, or are they peas? I'm not sure. It's one or the other. They're rather pretty at any rate, but no vegetables spotted on this plant as of yet.
Blooms on the other bean (I'm fairly certain about this one) plant. It's not as pretty as the purple flowers, but I've already pulled a few yellow beans off. Since my harvest was all of five beans I just chopped them up and threw them in a salad.
A full-view of the peas and beans climbing up their trellises. Some of the leaves are getting a little sun burnt as you can see, but otherwise they're growing quite happily.
Our over ridden red onion box. So here's a problem, we don't know when we're suppose to harvest the onions. The shoots are huge and drooping all over place, but how much is actually growing below the surface? I have no idea, I guess we'll leave them for now. More rouge peppers are popping up here (in the back is the mini-jungle of hanging tomatoes).
The blooms on the red onions.
Peppers. We have tons of these growing--beside the ones that seem to want to crop up spontaneously on their own (again, a product of using composted soil). If they reach full size we'll have plenty to roast up with the tomatoes into something outrageously delicious.
And then there's the red lettuce that decided to sprout in the pepper box--not that we put it there on purpose. It's grown fantastically, better then the lettuce we intentionally planted and seems to be a good companion plant for the peppers. We've been picking it periodically and adding it into our salads.
Banana peppers. We picked these up on a whim when we went to the Kuhlmann's Greenhouse and Nursery in the spring--they should probably be picked soon.
Rhubarb! I'm still occasionally picking stalks and adding them to my stash in my freezer. One day I will bake them into something fantastic, maybe muffins? I definitely won't have enough to do jam.
Ciao,
Andrea
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