Balcony garden update

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

Balcony graden 2010: Containers galore

I have not yet blogged about our gardening attempts for 2010. Even though we haven't had a huge amount of success in the past, we've really gone all out this year. I'm not sure what's made us so optimistic for this season, I think part of it is the introduction of our worm composters. We had plant matter growing in our compost bins (which we keep in our storage closet, in the dark), so we'd like to think that now that we have things properly planted in the soil and kept on the balcony in the sunshine, we should see more things growing, or even thriving. I think we're also just somewhat foolishly determined to grow something out there and the more stuff we plant, the better chance that at least one crop will work out.

Full view (or as much as I could get in) of the balcony with all of our containers. Note the bistro set, which we just got this weekend from Canadian Tire.

We started planting during the weeks following our return from Europe. First there was the epic task of trying to sift through our worm bins. At first we tried to be really careful and separate out as many of the worms as possible. However, after an entire afternoon disappeared spent working on only one bin, we were less devote going over the second. Once we re-bedded our worms we started planting (in fresh containers, or course), just the basics that we've tried before: carrots, radishes and the rhubarb plant we purchased from the farmer's market last year. We opted out of peas as they always ended up getting fried in the sun. Then we planted zucchini, as everyone I've ever known to grow zucchini says it grows like weeds. The next week at the farmer's market we picked up tomato and pepper plants (I tried to sprout these at home, but they didn't grow) and added them to the growing collection of pots on our balcony.

Our radishes. I hope we can harvest them soon.

Rhubarb, destine for jam or some kind of desert, like pie, or maybe a coffee cake.

The tomato plant, doing quite well too. Note the two tiny green tomatoes growing in the middle of the plant.

One of our big planters with a zucchini plant starting in the middle section. Lettuce is growing all around the exterior.

The peppers, starting to flower already.

Have I mentioned the potatoes yet? Supposedly they're great for container gardening and after I discovered a couple of instructional videos online about how to grow potatoes, we purchased a blue bin, some seed potatoes and planted those too. Oh...and then there's the newest addition to the family...this one's entirely Andrew's baby...we have a grapevine named Valiant. Okay, so Valiant isn't really it's name, it's the type of grape, but Andrew told me that's what its name is, so that's what I'm going to call it.

The potatoes, which seem to be as happy as a proverbial clam in their blue box. And Tabitha, probably watching some birds.

Valiant. A spindly right now, but we'll see what we can do over the summer.

We'll see how things progress over the months. Edmonton hasn't had a lot in the way of hot weather so far this year and after we'd gotten everything going we even had a couple of days of snow--which I think might have stunted the radishes. I have high hopes for the potatoes though, which seem to be doing really well. Otherwise, who knows what will work out. I'll definitely post again if we have any success.

Ciao,

Andrea