Balcony Garden Update
- Jun 17, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 31, 2022
It's a bright and shining Saturday morning, and my garden is flourishing !
Just to keep you updated on the garden progress from "MY EXPERIENCE APARTMENT GARDENING" , here's a few pictures .
There are quite a few plants that have come and gone since the beginning. Right now, everything we have is fairly mature, besides new seedlings on things we eat regularly. My most prosperous plant right now is all of my bell peppers. My husband and I have been using them a lot in breakfast and dinner so we planted a whole core's worth of seeds last year, and slowly separated them into what you see here, and into pots I've given away. There are at least 3 flowers blooming on each plant, and quite a few bell peppers already formed. One of the most successful and easiest plants I've experienced. I definitely recommend bell peppers as one of your first vegetables!
The next one I strongly recommend is tomatoes. They are touch and go when it comes to difficulty, but after about 9 months of trying, my tomato plants are finally easy to manage. I guess they just needed a lot more help getting to a good stage of maturity, before I could just leave them alone and water them. I use to trim and over-care my plants because I always wanted to be in the Garden, but I've fallen in love with the idea of letting your plants go wild. Just give them water, sun, and space, and let them do what they do.
The past couple of months, we have gotten a good supply of tomatoes, but they haven't been perfect. Our first one, of course, was juicy and delicious. After that we were getting split tomatoes after every good one. When I looked up why, it said it had to do with how I watered them. If I let them go dry for too long, and then water them really good, the inside of the tomato grows before the outside skin can, and it splits. We also had a problem with the soil not having enough Calcium, so one of the tomatoes grew a brown spot on the bottom. As you can see the tomato journey has been a learning process but we know now !
The last tomato picture you see is what happens when you plant a couple of your bad tomatoes in a pot. All the seeds sprouted and we have countless tomato seedlings! Time to separate them.
One thing I just started is Watermelon. This one is completely new to me, but it has been fun to watch. Watermelon is just a vine-y plant, it'll take over it's area and look great doing it! There are beautiful yellow flowers sprouting through mine right now so we made a WATERMELON WALL. Not only because it's a cute privacy wall for the balcony, but I feel like I will be able to utilize as much space as possible on my small balcony. I've seen pictures a long time ago of little hanging nets that hold the watermelon or whatever fruit or vegetable in place to grow, without hanging and snapping off. BEST IDEA EVER! That's exactly what I am going to do. Once I see a watermelon or two get to a good size, I'm hooking up nets, placing the watermelon right above the net, and letting it grow into it. Stay tuned to see how that goes!
You should also grow a few herbs for cooking as well. They are super easy to grow. I just put some seeds in a few buckets outside, watered them, and the herbs grew really fast. Low maintenance, and you'll love going outside, picking your herbs, and throwing them on the plate! We started with Basil, Cilantro and Parsley.
I couldn't tell you exactly when, but I planted a few Broccoli and Cauliflower seeds just to see how they grow. I would love to harvest some Broccoli, since we eat it at least 3 days a week. But that wasn't my main focus. I have never seen Broccoli grow so I had ZERO knowledge about it. In the clay-colored pot that you see above, is where most of them started out. They grew fast and strong, but stopped. Just like all my other plants, it was time to move them into a bigger home so they can finish their job. Once I planted 4 in a deep bucket, they have been thriving ever since. I can't want to see the harvest!
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