First Growing Season on the Balcony

At this point in the year most gardening tasks are complete - although I have to admit to having quite a bit of clean-up chores left - and I thought it would be nice to write a little bit about my experience this year with a balcony garden.

I wrote a post earlier in the season about how I was going about garden planning for such a small space, and here on the other side of things I’ve learned a lot. This post will just be about the general experience of the balcony - I’ll be writing up some harvest totals in a few weeks for those of you who are interested.

There are a lot of considerations when it comes to growing on a balcony. One thing I didn’t imagine ahead of time was that I’d end up with quite a pest problem. Without the natural ecosystem I’d encouraged in my previous gardens I found myself reaching for the insecticidal soap more frequently than I might like. My other main concern was keeping everything watered enough. My south facing balcony is very hot, and there is a large overhang which means it is almost completely dry as well. Not being able to rely on rain to keep my plants alive took a lot of adjustment. Not everything thrived as I got used to that, but I’ll chalk that up to learning experience.

There were a few surprises along the way. One was that because of the heat I had success with a different variety of crops than I was used to. The last garden was cool and shady on a north facing slope, so things like cucumbers never really took off there. Here I was able to pick quite a few off my two climbing plants. The heat also meant that my seasons were quite extended. My lime and olive trees were thriving outside even in the early spring and I just brought them inside yesterday. Allowing them to have access to outside longer really helped them. I’m hoping I can be more on top of their care through the winter and that they both get a good start next year. Maybe I’ll even get some limes again!

I’ve also - surprisingly - enjoyed the space constraint this year. I often bite off more than I can chew when I’m working on projects, and this year I was glad to have less to garden and more time to focus on my growing family. Life as a family of four brings a whole lot more chaos, not to mention that Mr. Forager also finished up his masters degree this summer and started a new role at work. It’s been a very full year!

I also wanted to create some space for our family to use outside. We moved things around a few times, but ultimately found space for a small bistro table and a propane grill. There’s some space for Little Forager to drive his toy cars, and even Baby Forager has enjoyed wiggling on a blanket outside.

We’ve all enjoyed having the balcony as a little extra space seeing as our apartment is so tiny. A surprising amount of wildlife has visited the garden - including pollinators like swallowtail butterflies - as well as birds and chipmunks. I wasn’t expecting this seeing as we’re surrounded by concrete parking lot, but to quote Jurassic Park, ‘life finds a way’.

Growing Up - Trellises and Other Garden Structures

I don't have a whole lot of space to garden, so I try my best to make the most of my vertical space using trellises and other structures. We're also renting our space, so nothing can be too permanent. I've designed my whole garden to be able to be taken apart if we need to move - we'll undo the raised beds, and the grass that is seeded there will be so healthy from my lovely garden soil. I say that as a preface because there are other great options out there, but for us it is most important that they work well, are cheap, and are easy to remove when needed.

We work with bamboo poles and twine, for the most part. This year we wanted to do some low tunnels over our raised beds, so we bought some PVC pipe and rebar stakes. We cut them too big last year, but that worked in our favour because I am enjoying using their length for trellising. In the above photos you can see my twine and PVC archway (left) that I have peas growing up one side, and cucumbers and squash on the other. In the photo on the right is a square trellis for peas that I made by weaving thinner bamboo stakes (6 ft. length) and leaning it against the wall. You can see it more fully in the photo below.

The above photo is a bit cluttered, but it does show what the garden actually looks like on a day to day basis - not just when I take a beautiful photo for Instagram! You can see my potato tower here, which I am still enjoying using. I've actually added another bin to grow potatoes in this way since it worked so well. I've got some chicken wire for things to grow up, and the long line of poles and twine is something I am trying for tomato supports. I've seen a lot of people use farm fencing for this, so I sort of made my own thing using six foot hardwood stakes, bamboo poles, and twine. The stakes are drilled into the raised beds, and the poles are keeping each tomato plant upright. The twine running between them keeps everything together and strong. 

We're also using plants as trellises - I put in a lot of sunchokes this year, and I've got beans planted below to climb them. I've done the same elsewhere with sunflowers. I'm hoping the corn will grow tall enough to help some of my beans out as well, but I've got some other supports ready in case it fails me again this year.

What are some of your favourite ways to use the vertical space in your garden? I'd love to hear all about it in the comment section!

Spring 2018 Garden Tour

Those of you who have been following along with my Instagram stories voted that you wanted my next post to be a garden tour, so here it is!  I don't think I've ever shown the whole thing completely like this, so I'm happy that a garden tour was something you all said you wanted to see.  Things are a little bit haphazard, and not completely tidy and manicured, but I wanted to give you a sense of what it looks like in real life on a regular day.  There is a lot I still want to do - and a lot more I would do if we weren't merely renting the space, but for now this is what it looks like.

The area I have for my garden is all north facing, so I am having to be creative with how I arrange it, and what I grow.  I am starting a lot of things inside that my neighbours would normally succeed with by direct seeding.  We've been adding on a few raised beds each season, so the layout evolved organically.  In the photo above you can see the four newest additions.  I think we have room for one more (beside the furthest bin in the left photo below).  Since we are tenants, we wanted everything to be affordable, and easy to dismantle in the event that we needed to move out.  We chose to make all of our raised beds without bottoms or lining of any kind so we can simply unscrew them, spread out the beautiful soil, and reseed with grass.  If you follow me on Instagram you can see the process of how I put them together in my saved stories.  We buy 10"x2"x12' boards from the hardware store and each bin is one board.  It's not the most elegant solution, but it's very affordable, and keeps things in small, manageable sections.  It's also easy to walk across, or stand on their walls if I need to reach something, or don't want to walk all the way around a path.

You'll notice that a few of the beds have PVC pipe hoops over them.  We were planning on doing some poly tunnels over a few of them to extend the growing season last winter but ran out of time.  I'll be using them as trellises for the vining plants this summer, and then we'll do them as low tunnels this coming winter and see what we can overwinter.

So far there isn't all that much planted this year.  I have some perennials - raspberries, bunching onions, strawberries, haskaps, blueberries, rhubarb, mint, chives, hyssop, lemon balm, and yarrow - and a few other things like brassicas that were just put in the ground very recently.  I am excited to see how my haskaps and rhubarb do now that they are well established and in their third or fourth years.  Bunching onions are a recent favourite I got last year from a neighbour who was dividing their plant.  I haven't had very good success with growing regular onions, so having them in the ground, basically ready to eat all the time has been a revelation!  They don't have much of a bulb, so I still buy regular onions, but you can use these any way you would use a spring onion, or a shallot.

In the above photo you can see a few of our bins that don't match our other basic square ones.  The three small ones near the wall were made for me by a friend from Church who had some spare wood and wanted to make some for me.  The really long raised bed is one we did before we realized that it is really hard for me to reach all the way to the back of it - especially now that we have the potato bin and other beds blocking the access from a few directions.  I also filled in the space behind the three small bins with dirt for some perennial berry bushes.  You can see this better in the photo below.

As far as what is growing right now, below are a few snapshots of the perennials (and some overwintered brassicas) coming back to life for the spring.  The one I am most excited for is the rhubarb, but I am also watching the progress of the Bianca hops (top left photo) closely as it is my first time growing them, and I think hops bines are really beautiful. 

As always, I am so grateful for the gorgeous view of the valley I have from my garden.  The best mornings are when I have a mug of coffee, and I get to wander around the garden and check on everything.  We have quite a few birds and other animals that come to visit, so I enjoy watching them and marking the seasons when they come and go.  Right now the warm weather is bringing back the tree swallows, and I love watching their swooping flights.  We have deer, and bears (mixed blessings there as they can also be quite the nuisances), and last year a whole bunch of garter snakes were born right in the garden.  Little forager enjoyed watching them, and I enjoyed that they helped take care of some of the pests.  I love that I have a garden that encourages biodiversity.   

I'd love to hear about your gardens in the comments below.  Or if you don't have a garden talk to me about what you wish you could do if you had a garden!

Garden Update

Spring is here, but the growth is coming along sluggishly.  The other day on an otherwise dreary afternoon I looked up from some garden chores and this enormous, glorious rainbow was suddenly stretching across the valley!  I tried fussing with filters and contrast and whatnot to try to give you all an idea of how tremendously beautiful it was, but this is not even half as beautiful as it actually looked.

This year I have a new garden "helper" in Little Forager.  There he is helping me dig in the raised beds with his own shovel.  All those little round things are nasturtium seed pods.  I have no idea if they are actually going to grow again, but it would be nice to have those again!  They are so beautiful and are also useful edibles!  I always love it when something is beautiful, beneficial to pollinators, and tasty for me!

Here is my seed starting setup this year.  It hasn't been all that long since I took this photo, and already the seedlings are HUGE!  This year I had the idea to keep the plastic cover on (normally I have the door down and zipped up as well) partially to keep Little Forager out, and partially to capture any heat that might come off the light bulbs.  I wasn't thinking there would be all that much heat generated from them, but it has seriously made a huge difference!  Since I don't have a heat mat, I normally get really bad germination with anything that needs a little heat to get going, but this solved that problem entirely.  I will be doing it this way every year now.

As you can see I probably over planted for my actual needs, but I am used to having poor germination rates, and also carelessness claiming the lives of many of my seedlings so I always over plant.  This year everything is going really well (so far - fingers crossed!) so I might need to have a plant sale or something to deal with my extra seedlings!  Everything is looking super healthy, and I am really excited about that!

We also tackled some outside chores.  Little Forager loves "sweeping".  There is still so much clutter left over from not really tidying up the garden before winter hit!  We'll get to it.  You can really see in this photo how slowly things are starting to grow.  It won't be long now though!