Digging for gold - harvest time!

Today we harvested the rest of the potatoes, a beet, and a handful of carrots. The potatoes grew quite tall and the stocks in one of the planters snapped, so there were very few potatoes there, but the other two planters were quite reasonable. In total just over 3 pounds of vegetables.

I have yet to try the beet, but the carrots are very good, and the potatoes are absolutely delicious.

Mutant!

I saw a very interesting ladybug on the balcony munching on aphids. I'm not sure if this two-tone specimen is a rare breed, or some form of mutant aphid killer.

Lemons - sort of

It does not look like homemade lemonade is in the works for this year. The lemon tree had a great start, but for some reason most of the lemons turned yellow or black and fell off before getting very large.

Quantity Increasing

Strawberries are starting to look pretty good and in reasonably large quantities. They are not quite as sweet as I remember but certainly more tasty than the grocery store variety shipped in from California.

The cherry tomatoes are ripening and quite tasty. Not quite as large a yield as last year.

The super chili peppers are starting to turn yellow, but look like they still need quite a bit more sun before they are ready.

Flower Power

The eggplant is finally producing flowers, but no fruit, the flowers simply fall off before any fruit starts to form. At least the plant is looking a lot healthier now, although it's unlikely we will have any eggplant to eat this summer.

My favorite insect also made a rare visit, it was the first honeybee I saw on the balcony. I had a honey bee hive a number of years ago when I lived on a much larger property and have a real affinity for them. The flowers of interests were the second blossoming of the meyer lemon tree which smelled amazing. More on the lemon tree in the next post.

Garden insects

I have been seening these black insects with orange spikes for some time now and could not figure out what they were, and I seemed to have a lot of them! A search online revealed that they are young ladybugs! All that mating earlier in the year resulted in a bumper crop of new ladybugs. The one shown here has stuck itself to the leaf and is about to transform into a shiny red bug.

Another interesting fellow is this wasp like insect which I had heard numerous times but never clued in to where the scrape, scrape, sound was coming from. It was using its mandibles to scrape small curls of wood off the planter stands. I'm still not sure what this one was.

Drip irrigation

Summer has finally arrived and the temperature is hot! And with the hot weather comes more frequent watering. Watering the garden takes many trips with the watering can and it's hard to prevent overflows onto the neighbors below. I have tried many crackpot methods in the past, but this year I think I have the problem solved.

I have outfit the balcony with a drip irrigation system that runs off the kitchen sink faucette. All I have to do is remove the sink fitting and screw on the irrigation adapter, which includes a backflow preventer, filters, and pressure reducer. The plastic bottle is used as an in-line liquid fertilizer distributor. turn on the tap and 15 minutes later the garden is fully fertilized and watered with no overflow.

The irrigation equipment came from the following supplier:

http://www.northerngardensupply.ca/