spring fever

Spring is here and as always, I am so excited to get out and grow things! We’ve had unnaturally warm and sunny weather in the past few weeks and the balcony is already coming alive – sorry US readers, I’m just telling it how it is. We had the never ending winter last year!


My seed order has arrived and I’ve started most of them. This year I will be growing tomatoes (a personal variety from a friend of a friend’s garden in Spain), peppers, lots of salads, sugar snap peas, spinach and kale. That’s the plan anyway. The hardy herbs, mints and strawberries are waking up from their winter sleep too.


New on the list this year are flowers, I will be trying violets, nasturtiums and snapdragons to brighten up our little space. The calendula seeds I mixed in here and there last year have survived the winter and this little guy was the first splash of color to surprise us a week ago.

To start seeds I have three ‘classes’ of plants: Some are started indoors and kept inside until the end of May. These are the delicate tomatoes and peppers as well as some flowers. I have set up my DIY light box again, which has served me very well in past years.
There’s also a little poly greenhouse on the balcony (just a shelf with foil cover) which acts as a cold frame where I grow the salads, kale and some flowers. Others such as the peas and spinach can be started our in the open directly.


There’ll be updates on this little balcony garden frequently throughout the growing season.
What are you growing this year?

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gardening 2011 – part 2

*Click here for part 1*
Ok, so far I’ve only shown bits and pieces of my plants, but by now the balcony is looking quite nice so I think it’s time for an overall look.
Here it is, this is the view from the door looking out onto our balcony:

The flower boxes hold strawberries which are just now starting to bloom. In the far end corner by the chair you can see the raspberry plant and the pots underneath the flower boxes hold beans and peas or are waiting for their tomatoes and peppers (they also hold basil and parsley and calendula and bunching onions which had to go in already).
This is the view standing in the corner by the raspberry, looking toward the door and the two greenhouses:

The little wooden box and the small ladder were both thrift store finds. I had actually been looking for something like it for a while and was thrilled to find these! They hold the herbs, which will need to go back into the greenhouse should the nights get colder again. But for now I think they just look so pretty here:

Ok, so much for a general overview, back to the seedlings I’ve been fussing over for the last couple of weeks.
The tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers went out into the greenhouse permanently a week ago and yesterday I transplanted them to larger newspaper pots (look how small the first pots are looking in comparison, it was high time!). I will also need to start fertilizing now.

I hope they continue to do well, at this stage I would honestly be crushed should they die on me. The seedlings get the sunny top shelf in the greenhouses:

The top shelf in the other greenhouse is taken up by all my experiments with starting seeds directly in the greenhouse or sprouting inside and then transferring them outside (I went a little wild experimenting after I got the greenhouses). I was so scared that my first attempt would fail and now pretty much everything has sprouted and is growing and I will have so many plants to give away to friends!

And to really make you tired of seeing baby plant pics, here’s the week by week on the indoor seedlings:

Also, last but not least, the lettuce is also thriving, so much that I really need to thin it (and I can even eat the thinnings as baby lettuce, so nothing goes to waste!):

Ok, this was a marathon post, next ones will be shorter again, promise 😉

surprise compost

The first night frosts are not far off and we’re slowly but surely getting our balcony ready for winter, potting baby strawberries, cutting back perennials, throwing out dying plants and generally cleaning up.

We still have some harvest, the raspberries keep on coming and the peppers continue to ripen.

Everything that doesn’t get eaten right away goes in the overflowing freezer (I still haven’t found the time to make jam and syrup). I like to freeze basil and oregano whole and crush it over pizza and tomatoes when I need it.

It’s a pitiable amount this year but I just got this great book for my birthday and now have all winter to devise a strategical plan to use every ounce of balcony space for gardening next spring.
The biggest surprise in cleaning up was this huge pot: It housed bamboo for a couple of years until the cold winter 2008/2009 killed it off. We never really got around to emptying it and used it as a trash can for the last 2 years, dumping weeds and dead plants and even whole plants we wanted to get rid of in it. This weekend I finally put my foot down and demanded my boyfriend haul it down to the real trash can (2 stories below). When clearing off the thin top layer of dead plant material however, we discovered that all the other material had been in it long enough to have turned into beautiful rich compost soil!

So now we’re keeping it until next spring and can then mix the soil with potting soil and hopefully save on chemical fertilizers 🙂
The other great news is: my friend is planning a monthly cooking class for us, so we will finally learn to cook and eat healthy. By next summer we will hopefully have learned to use our then hopefully plentiful harvest well.