Iโm in my 3rd year gardening from my balcony and living room. Hereโs a quick overview of my experiences to help newbie apartment gardeners navigate the many options available.
I have no idea what kind of pepper plant it is, my neighbor gifted it to me after I helped her take out her recycling and she said she canโt remember what kind it was lol
Itโs just a small thing but I had some eggs and toast the other morning and remembered a friendโs suggestion to mix fresh basil into my scrambled eggsโฆ so I literally walked onto my balcony and harvested some basil! Mind = blown. I grew that basil! Iโve been lovingly tending to it on my balcony for weeks and weeks and now I get to EAT it!!
Just need to vent a little, but I am so tired of spider mites devouring my garden. I keep them down using a water spray, but this is of course not enough to get entirely rid of them, and with the heat wave they are multiplying fast. I spend a lot of time doing this. Iโve tried some various oil concoctions (not neem oil, as that has been a little hard to source where I am, but canola oil was one I found recommended) without much luck, and they left a sticky residue on the foliage, so I stopped doing it.
Hi all! Iโm poor. Iโm attempting to get my balcony garden started without spending more than 30 dollars. (Iโm probably nuts, I know.) It looks like a good chunk of that will be going to a water hose and sink attachment so I donโt have to haul a milk jug of water back and forth a hundred times, so Iโm hurting a bit on funds for fertilizer. To make matters worse, the landlord says Iโm not allowed to compost anywhere in the apartment or on the property. (I would just hide it under my kitchen sink, what she doesnโt know wonโt hurt her etc, but thereโs other reasons why I canโt unfortunately.)
Assume you had access to a 6 by 6 balcony that faces south with a nice railing and (miraculously) endless access to water. Set whatever budget makes it interesting for you. How would you design your garden to produce as much food as possible? Could you produce enough to sustain yourself? How close could you get? What crops would you prioritize?
Like much of the world, the weather is getting much more inconsistent where I live. Unreasonably warm weather starts earlier, but the risk of a frost still stays relatively late.
Very excited to try balcony gardening for the first time! Or, well, any gardening at all for the first time! Pictured here is one basil plant, one tomato plant, and then a lavender that I didnโt expect to grow because the seeds expired five years ago XD
My garden in June of this season. Everything came together to make this the most lush and vibrant season I've ever had - a very mild summer, more watering and fertilizing than I've done in the past, carefully nurtured local predator populations thriving and keeping pests mostly in check, and a rare frostless winter starting everything off strong.
I know summer is almost over. Shush. Everything is semi hydro, using the dosing rates suggested by the brilliant @Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net in a post here on Lemmy.
I just realized that I have ants in my...apple tree. Not complaining, I actually see this as a major achievement. The balcony is only 1,5m x 3m, but loaded with wild flower stuff I planted for the 2 beehotels. The apple tree is 3 years old, about 4m high and didn't flower yet. But the birds love it, as do ants apparently.
I'm a bit emotional right now. But in the bad way to be fair.
I just got stung by a wasp without any reason, after having to take a extensive shower before because my body was totally itchy from all the mites and whatnot. UGH! ๐ซ
This will be the fourth garden I'll leave before the harvest. The first two times my heart was utterly broken. I 'had' lots of land, and then just before a rich harvest my life would turn upside down and I left. The third garden I started out of an inner need to garden, I didn't care anymore who would eat what I planted and really started to understand that land is not to be owned, but cared for.
I have tried to make some self-watering plant boxes where I 3D-print some containers with holes to act as wicks to absorb moisture into a top container with soil. The wicks themselves are packed with soil.
I recently freed up some space indoors to form a seedling station that will allow me to transfer plants out on the balcony during the growing season in my country, and for indoor pots in the off-season. It is a two-story shelf on the top of a cabinet.
I wanna show you my this years' brain child. I already put weeks and weeks of work into it, and right now, I'm at the point where I can say that it's about 90% finished.
But I guess that's good enough for now.
My balcony renaturation program is hitting like a truck. Going outside there is like visiting a conservation camp, and the sheer diversity of different insects and stuff is just amazing.
I cat proofed my balcony last year, and for achieving that, I had to fill those big pots with concrete to create the fundament for the rods, that hold the net.
I've had some kind of illness with tomato plants and it spread in a way that is pathogenic where a 3rd plant was kept separate but upon leaving in closer proximity it become infected. I thought the first two were due to some circumstantial factors like using some soil from another plant that died, or pots with poor drainage, but the third plant did not have these factors. So am I forced to clean surfaces, toss the soil and start over, or can I reclaim the soil?
This is me slowly dialing in an intuitive understanding of planting and growing from absolutely no money spent. There are Jalapeรฑos, three tomatoes in pots - experiments, and a pot of green onions.
My mornong glory's leaves on my balcony has some problems. I'm not sure what could be the issue, some other plants show similar symthoms (celery's leaves for example)
If you are using larger planter boxes, what material and size did you choose? I have a basically rectangular balcony and would like to put a planter box across each of the short ends, perhaps wooden or even concrete. Any wisdom from experience out there?
I repotted my sugar snap peas into a larger upcycled kitty litter container that I found in a dumpster. There was plenty of space, so I added radishes that only take 23 days to mature to maximize my use of space. What are your favourite companion plants?
I have had earwigs eating my balcony garden crops, so I decided to try a solution I found online: add 50/50 soy sauce and oil to a container and leave it overnight. It was filled with earwigs the next morning! So I am setting up another trap with an empty tofu dessert container.
Alt: Photo of young green cherry tomatoes on a tomato plant on a balcony. The photo mostly shows green tomato plant foliage. There are some yellow tomato flowers in the top left corner of the frame.
I had filled a pot with seedlings, so the nursery pots I found at the side of the road came in handy today. I split them into their own pots which I will give away to friends and family once they grow larger.
I do not have a balcony, but I thought I would share the videos I have collected in the past just in case they ended up helping someone. I just joined, so I am not sure how/if they can be embeded, so I will just put links.
I got quite a large Bedroom Window that I like to keep open during the Night and I thought it would lend itself super nicely for some Strong and Nicely smelling aromatic plants just outside it, so that by proxy the room itself always has that lovely plant flavour.
My SO and I have been planning to start a mushroom garden for awhile now. You can buy these kits with mushroom spawn in peg form, and you just drill holes in a log and hammer them in. I'd had big dreams of going along the bike path, adding them to all the dead logs there, until I learned how important it is to properly and thoroughly inoculate freshly-cut logs in order to make sure your fungus of choice is properly established and safe from the competition. This was a bit of a problem as we live in an apartment and the circumstances where I'd cut down a healthy tree are seriously slim, and don't include providing food for mushrooms.
I'm launching a little balcony gardening project that involves water reservoirs. I don't have much experience with these kinds of projects, so I need a little help.
Does anyone have a good method for dealing with plant debris? I'm thinking about things like stems from plants, or even just pruned bits. I don't have a place to compost effectively. My normal method for woody debris is to cut it to little pieces with garden shears, and for leafy stuff to just let it dry out and crunch it up. After, I'll just stick it in the bottom of a pot that I'm going to put a new plant in. It gets a little broken down, but not as well as I'd like, and I can only do it when I have a new plant to pot, so I end up with a random pile of stuff that sits around for a while.
I started in mid-November and have already had 5 harvests! The outrageous red and oak leaf letteuce have done the best. None of the black seeded Simpson survived. They're all leggy because of the distance to my grow lights but one of these days I'll get around to setting up a way to drop them down.
Some years ago, I was learning brussels sprouts and had a few extra starts. I gave most away, but one I planted in a pot for goofs. It stuck around for a few seasons, even surviving a bolt. So, it became Brusselfriend. Three years later it finally bolted and killed itself. A few of the seeds grew into new sprouts and this one survived the whole season. So, PoB is now headed into their second season. If it bolts this year, hopefully I can keep the line going
I've had irrigation running on my porch for a few years now, so I figured it was worth making a post about how it works, and the pros and cons of it. I'm by no means an expert.
I have a balcony on raised ground floor with lots of trees hiding the sun. In the summer I get a few hours of direct sunlight, not enough to get anything flowering. I attempted growing tomatoes, and ended up with the tallest, most useless plant ever. Strawberries were also mostly leaves. There is a planter integrated on the balcony design though, which is nice.\
Is there anything with fun leaves I could grow ? Preferably low maintenance and resistant to low temperatures. (not necessarely frost resistant, though better)\
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Edit: I also generally can't keep stuff that flowers, hence my request.
I snagged a deal on grocery store basil. What sized pot(s) would be best to repot this into as 13 stems is a bit crowded for a 4" pot lol. Trying to keep this lil' fella happy.
Somebody please help me save this plant. This is a crรชpe myrtle. It is a couple months old. It was doing really well and then one day it looked very sad. I dug it up and the roots look really good. I was worried because I had a lemon tree die of root rot. The tree is under grow lights if that gives any more information.
Jemmy
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