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28.11.11
I just want distractions.
16.11.11
The nasturtiums are still blooming in mid-November. This being the first opportunity to have a full growing season on the balcony, I went a little crazy, and a little childhood-revenge vendetta. Like many children (we're creating more of them at work every day), at some point I got one of those adorable mini-greenhouse things with cartoon depictions of plants that you could grow yourself, quickly and easily, guaranteed. These never seem to work satisfactoraly. Perhaps the pace of watching plants grow exceeds the attention span of even the most disturbingly obsessive children.
Knowing this, we bought two at work to try them out. Both worked. I gave one back to the store to display proudly, which then withered and died. The other is still growing on my desk.
Despite my current success, my past faliure still taunted the botanist in me (I know, botany's not horticulture, but still). Seed packages of sweet peas, nasturtiums, and green beans covered what I could remember of the failed kit, later unsuccessful attempts, and a bit of nostalgia from the veg garden my Grandfather grew in our backyard.
I assembled the requisite infrastructure from salvaged and repurposed containers and made several trips to hardware/garden centres for soil, each bag of which was individually hauled up from the car. Seeds were planted in April, a few garden centre plants, mostly herbs, were added in May. I watered, we had sunshine, little green shoots poked up.
The nasturtiums subsequently went wild. Other people had compact, dense plants, mine grew leggy and turned themselves into trailing vines metres long. They were still covered in flowers from deepest red through pale, creamy yellow, so I wasn't complaining too much. Maybe it's because my south-facing balcony only receives about an half-metre wide strip of direct sun in midsummer (thank you overhanging balconies), meaning I have full sun, part shade, and full shade within spitting distance of each other. A lavender and rosemary, both good in full sun and drought-tolerant, looked miserable until I balanced them as close to the edge of the deck as I dared. I got fresh basil, chives, and mint through summer, a strawberry plant produced a total of two edible berries (or, technically receptacles; not doing that again), and the sweet peas were very well behaved and produced salty-sweet smelling flowers over and over again. I also got one handful-sized harvest of rather tough beans (maybe I'll try a different variety next year).
The unanticipated part was the other trophic levels of organisms that the plants enabled. Little green caterpillars showed up on the nasturtium leaves, I let them be and later found two chrysalises from what turned out to be cabbage white butterflies. Aphids moved in, in what has been an ongoing battle (I need to adopt some ladybird beetles). A tolerably low number of small spiders set up camp. Bees and flies were transient visitors to the blooms. I also saw a crow perch on the rail, then hop into one of the planters and pick something out of the soil.
My mini-ecosystem still hasn't shut down, though we're expected to go below freezing soon. I have bulbs in the soil though, and plans for next season, equally dormant, until the Earth reminds us that it is, once again, time to grow.
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©d.tan  |
