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/

Garden view

One of the criteria of this balcony garden was that the balcony had to remain functional as a pleasant sitting area. Almost all containers are on shelving, the balcony rail or in the balcony corners, leaving room for a reclining chair, a kitchen chair when two people are on the balcony, and our small barbecue.

Excess growth has to be kept in check to prevent greenery from encroaching on our sitting space.

An old mirrored closet door I found next to the dumpster last year provides double sunlight to some of the balcony plants, depending on the angle of the sun at the time of year.

More edibles

The snap peas are now over 8 feet tall and providing a good number of pea pods for snacking. The nasturtiums are expanding beyond their allowable border and need to be trimmed, however I have just discovered that in addition to their tasty peppery flowers there is a hidden tube of sugary nectar, delicious.

Root vegetables

The Thumbelina carrots are absolutely delicious, although not that large. They probably could use another month of growing. The beets still have a ways to go. At this point I am probably eating more fresh vegetables from the patio garden than I do for from the supermarket.

Green onion soup

Our first entire meal made from garden vegetables was green onion soup. The green onions are enormous thumb width plants and the potatoes have delicate pink skins with bright white flesh.

Sweet and sour

The Meyer lemon did not enjoy our cold Spring, but has finally started growing a large number of small green lemons and fresh flowers. When this tree was first or just it was in flower and the smell was amazing. I am looking forward to when the flowers finally open. The red currants never flowered and there are no fruit on that bush this year, the Josta berry did flower and fruit and they are quite tasty, in addition to being photogenic.

Radish take 2

The radish plants were quite large, however the actual vegetable was not very impressive and tasted terrible. Given the size of the plants and the return on taste, they were all pulled up and replaced with carrots.

Aphid destroyers

This year was particularly bad for a fitness and it was very difficult to get rid of them. We tried a package of ladybugs which was very interesting to watch but not very successful. The ladybugs did eat quite a few aphids, but as soon as the net was removed they all flew away. Eventually the aphids just started to disappear on their own.