I love succulents. These two are doing really well on my balcony. The hanging one I bought at a plant sale last fall and it's wintered on my windowsill. It loves it outside though! The little red flowers hang down about a foot!
But...
*sigh*
For the second year in a row, my balcony garden is a bit of a failure. I thought the shallow planter my dad made that I added to my balcony wouldn't drain well and would get swampy. The opposite has happened - it's so shallow the plants drink up the water so quickly that on hot days I have to water twice so everything doesn't wilt! The violas are doing well, they spring back if they wilt and are generally filling up their row colourfully.
The second row however, as you can see in the photo, is dead. This was my basil - my favourite part of the garden. We've mostly had rainy, grey, and cold days this June. Apparently that's not optimal growing conditions for baby basil. I picked what I could before the stalks turned brown and got 5 servings of pesto out of it. Some of the little plants are starting to come up again, and I planted seed, so we'll see how it goes. I wont be eating basil all summer though, unless I remember to go get another taller starter plant (and even then, I don't have any pots to plant it in!).
The last two rows are mostly a failure too. The spinach, lettuce, radish and chard are growing fine - but those f-ing leaf miners have gotten into my leaves again!! The same thing happened last year: leaf miners destroyed all my green eating veggies in 2012. I don't know how/why it's happened again. I used different containers, different seeds and different soil - or did I? I got my soil from my parents garden, and my mom had leaf miner trouble last year. How did those little buggers survive the winter?? Where do they come from?? I've got more seed but there's no point planting more. And I can't even eat anything because the little plants don't get big enough to eat before the buggers destroy them. Grr.
They seem to be leaving the radish leaves alone. The plan is to pull up a radish to see if it's growing, then to pull up the chard and plant radishes there too. Maybe I'll get something out of it. I'm going to pull up the lettuce and spinach and plant more flowers in there I guess. Or maybe I'll plant some cat grass.
*sigh*
Sad.
My zucchini is growing awesome though! This one got to about a foot long. I ate it on my pizza for dinner tonight. Yum! Both plants are going to yield a lot of zucchini this year - if I can keep them alive!
This is from inside - my spider plant has sent off a baby!
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