How does your garden grow?

Ok, since I seem to to be in the mood to talk plants these past couple of days, the current blather is going to feature my balcony.  Which, incidentally, badly needs sweeping.  If you happen to be around and want to do it, please feel free to drop by.

My balcony, as I've mentioned before, has  a southern exposure.  That plus the fact that it has side walls that close it in somewhat make it quite the accidental greenhouse.  It's not hard to grow things with very little effort there, and that's a good thing because I'm all about the no-effort garden.

I already have my mini-garden in for the year, which puts me well ahead of the previous couple of years.  I'd been having a little bit of trouble with motivation, you see, so even though I can put stuff on the balcony at least a couple of weeks earlier than you'd put them in at ground level, the planter boxes were staying pretty bare until the last possible minute.  Why not this year?  Not sure, really.  Maybe I just got tired of being so late.

Even when I'm late, though, I still plant.  There's a couple of reasons for that, I suppose.  First of all, there's the family history of plants = good.  Both sides of my family are gardeners, and I guess I inherited some of that.  Come the last dregs of winter, I get almost jonesing to plant something.  I've been known in the past to even attempt to start plants early indoors.  In my VERY SMALL apartment, yes.  In the end it's not worth the hassle and I never (ok, rarely) do it anymore, but I can't deny the urge to plant something.  Anything.  It's a form of mental illness, maybe , but if so it's a harmless one.

The second reason for the balcony gardening need, as best I can figure, is that I have a balcony.  Yeah, I know that sounds pretty facile, but the first apartment I had when I was living in Edmonton didn't have a balcony.  One of my first thoughts when I moved into a place that did have a balcony was that it would be a good place to put plants.

And so I do.

The balcony garden varies from year to year.  Sometimes I'll get overambitious and scout out the garden centres for novelties or specific colour schemes or whatever weird plan sounds like a good one at that particular moment.  Those are the years when I end up spending way too much on bedding plants and find out that yet again I've bought juuust a few too many for the space I have.  Some years I go for a more utilitarian garden. A few different veggies that may actually survive the heat out there, a few flowers for colour, a few things for the birds (BUT NOT THE PIGEONS...).  This year?  Well, I've been having some neck issues so I decided just to seed instead of wrestling with bedding out.  Some different climbing things for the balcony railing, some dwarf sunflowers because I like sunflowers, and assorted flowers to fill in the blank spots.  And, of course, the volunteers.

Oh, the volunteers.

Last year I was more than a little slow in getting things cleaned up in the fall (but it did make the chickadees happy to have the dead plants to play with over the winter) and as a result some of last year's plants dropped seed.  Seed which has already sprouted.  Seed which will grow up to be...

Plants, I expect.

I can't really remember everything I planted last year, so this is going to be a guessing game.  I know that there's some morning glory, and... um... borage?  I'm pretty sure I had a couple of borage plants, and heaven knows that they're self-seeding.  Alllll over the place, if I remember right.  And what else?  No flipping idea.  This might be interesting.

At the moment I'm just letting everything grow until I can at least guess as to what I'm dealing with.  After all, some of it's bound to go well with the new stuff I've put in, and if it doesn't it can easily be pulled.  I don't mind a surprise garden so much.  It keeps things interesting.

And no doubt I'll keep you posted as to how interesting it gets.





Today's blather was brought to you by the Victoria Day long weekend which, although described as May Two-Four in many circles, was better known in my childhood as Help Mom Put The Garden In weekend.  I'm sure at least a couple of my two fans are up to their elbows in potting soil as well, since it wasn't just my family to be found frequenting the nurseries.

I probably won't be near a computer tomorrow, so I'll leave you all to putter away as best you see fit.  Have a good one.