Spring Cleaning and Balcony Garden Setup
More spring cleaning! Here's what the eyesore of a view on my balcony has been for the last oh, couple of months. Yuck. I did something about it yesterday, and started my garden too!
I have this funky neighbor. He's kind of weird, he's got a life sized cut out of mel gibson braveheart style in his living room, and he has a bunch of funky lights strung out around his balcony and outside his front porch area downstairs. I think he sells plants at a farmer's market or SOMETHING, but either way, I got a decent photo of his not-so-attractive gardening methods. I figured I'd post them as an idea of how NOT to set up my balcony garden!
So I got the whole balcony cleaned off, all the dead leaves and pine needles and old dead plants thrown away, and got the whole thing swept thoroughly. I moved mark's tools and my bike against the wall, and pushed the bins and all the pottery into the other corner on that same side. I put the new window box planters up, and organized my gardening supplies.
So one thing I've started doing in all my containers is adding a layer of something along the bottom to allow for extra drainage. I usually use large gravel or some other kind of small rocks, but here's what I realized when I was trying to clean out my pots from last year: rocks in pots are heavy! Ugh!
Here's my solution: Lava rocks! Mainly used in hydroponics, these are a great size, are very lightweight, provide great drainage, and are also porous, adding a little more usable room for water to be stored. This is great for me, since I tend to have a little bit of a problem keeping my herbs hydrated come the warmer months. I just pour a thin layer across the bottom, and continue with my container potting mix from there.
Here's the first of the herbs. On the left are the garlic chives that I saved from last year's window boxes (I wonder what kind of flavor they still have) and greek oregano. There's still room for when I sprout the rest of the herbs over the next few weeks.
There's no shortage of tomato plants at my house right now.
On the very left in the taupe pot, there are 5 beefsteak tomato plants. The first small green pot to your left has another large variety red tomato, and the second small green pot has a yellow pear tomato plant. The large green pot has 3 more beefsteaks, and the far right in the purple ceramic pot is a cute little jalapeño.
My mom said she planted an onion that sprouted the other day. Once my cilantro gets going, we'll just need a lemon and we'll have some great salsa!
