Patio Plants are Going Strong: The latest pictures are in

I have to say, I have the greenest balcony I have ever seen.  I won't lie and say it is very tidy, but it definitely is very green.  The most exciting two pieces of news are:  the eggplant is finally making fruit and the pole beans I plated to grow over the balcony rails and up the side of the porch are making beans.

This is the biggest eggplant.

This one is still quite small.  I counted five of them that are definitely fruiting, and loads more flowers, as well.

You can't see the beans here, but the iPhone does not take close up pictures very well and the bean pictures just would not turn out.  When I pick a few I will take a picture of that.  Don't you think the beans look nice growing like this? 

Oh, I forgot.  There is one more piece of exciting news.  We got our first tomato off of the Belgian beauty heirloom tomato plant.  It is small, but cute.  I will let you know how it tastes.

This is the little guy before I picked him.  He is so cute.

The rest of his brothers (don't ask me why tomatoes are boys today) are much bigger and very lumpy.  They are not showing any color yet.

These two are hanging on the outside of the balcony railing.

There are s few hidden inside the foliage.  The pole beans have used some of the branches to climb up.  I am not too worried about that.

Here are a couple more future Belgian beauties.

This is what the eggplant looks like now.  If you look close you can see the leaves that were damaged by the aphid infestation.   Many of them have fallen off, and lots of new clean wonderful leaves have grown in.  It is really flowering strong.  Eggplants make such beautiful flowers.

This is the super hot jalapeno plant.  We have picked about 5 or 6 of these, and they are quite hot.  I was wondering if growing in a pot would make them wimpy, but it does not seem to have affected them.  They even made my husband cry and he loves hot peppers strait from the garden.  There he was crunching away on a whole pepper, with tears streaming down his cheeks saying, "wow, honey, these are great peppers."  I am not that into hot peppers.  I don't eat them strait and raw like that.  I like to make salsa and use them in my cooking.

This is the baby roma that I rescued.  It is just as big as its two larger twin brothers, but is a little behind.  It has has only one ripe tomato while its brothers have each had around 10.

I have always liked hens and chicks.  These are very cute.  If you don't remember, I found these in my mothers garden when she moved into a new house and we were clearing it to make room for vegetables.  They were very small and cute.  I thought they might be a smal variety, but they have grown quite large to prove me wrong.  I will definitely take these with me and plant them in the ground when we get a house.

Here are the lavender plants my daughter rescued in the same weekend.  I think they have grown as big as their pots will let them. We have picked and dried some flowers for my daughters magic potions, or should we call them chemical solutions.  She loves to mix things up and see what happens.

The cherry tomato has also run out of room in its pot, I believe.  It has really stopped growing.  It is still making tomatoes ( I took this picture after I picked the ripe ones), but I think it might not do very well in the future.  You can see the roots crowding in the pot.  Notes for next year: do not plat cherry tomatoes or romas in pots. Peppers, beans, and eggplants seem to do great though.  I think next time I will listen to the experts and plant determinant varieties of tomatoes.  There are several nice heirloom tomatoes that are determinate.  I bought one late this spring, the Bradley that I squeezed into the garden plot between the peppers and tomatoes.

This is one of the Roma twins.

The Rosemary is doing quite well.  I believe I will cut it back and dry the clippings for an herbal soap.  I do love rosemary soap.

This is the other Roma twin.

This picture is very blurry, but you can get the idea.  The cinnamon basil is huge and the flowers have gotten away from me.  I was trying to keep them clipped off, but there are just too many now.  The beans are loving them.  That is good.  That might be why everything else is fruiting so nice when it wasn't before.

This is a picture of the Belgian beauty from farther away.

Remember when I freaked out because I thought that my basil would go to seed and I wouldn't have any to go with my tomatoes when they were ripe?  I went and planted several small pots with cinnamon and Thai basil.  Well, those are now starting to bloom as well.

This is the prettiest one. The pots are kind of small. I was thinking I would transplant at least some of them into the big pot, but the other basil is so huge that is not possible,

I caught Cooper at it again.  I really should change his name to Ferdinand the Cow.

You can even see his teeth chomping on that leaf.  He is incredible.  Well, I hope you liked the virtual tour of the balcony garden.  Next up:  a tour through the community garden plot after the vandals have gone.

Patio Container Garden Update, Finally

It has been a while since I took pictures of the patio containers.  I finally borrowed my Auntie's camera and took some pictures of everything today.  My patio is getting to be like a jungle.  Okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but it is getting a bit out of control.  I seriously need to trim and tie things up as soon as I find my green plant tying stuff.

This is what my balcony/patio looks like from the lawn. We live on the second story.  I am worried that my nasturtiums that are creeping downwards might annoy the neighbors.  I will have to tell them that I will trim them up if they want.

This is the side view of the nasturtiums in the jalapeno pot.  They are really taking over. Poor pepper.

This is the creepingest nasturtium I have ever seen.  Before you ask, I don't know where you can get some seeds that grow like this because I planted seeds from two packets and one was a mixed variety bag, Alaskan Mix if I am not mistaken.  I don't know which seeds I planted in what pots.  They are all different colors, from yellow to dark orange.

Here is a front view of the poor jalapeno.  You can barely see it peeking out the top.  I did move the flowers aside to take pictures of the peppers.  Scroll down to see those.

Yum, I can't wait till I can pick these along with the tomatoes and make some spicy hot salsa.  My husband loves hot peppers in everything.

You can see how much of a jungle it is in this pot.

This is that little tiny Roma that I found in a pot and rescued earlier in the year.  One of the pots that I planted hops in never came up, so I put that poor tomato plant into it instead.  It desperately needs to be staked up.  I will have to make it to the store to buy a stake for it soon, or it will be drooping out of the pot.  It is already heavy with tomatoes.

This is the cherry tomato plant.  You can see some of the tomatoes are turning orange. These are orange when ripe, and I have been picking ripe ones and eating them for over a week.  There are at least a couple ripe ones out here every day.

Aren't these clusters of tomatoes beautiful.  They ripen from the inside towards the tip.

Here is that super creeping nasturtium from the other side.  The poor Roma tomato that shares it's pot doesn't know what to do. 

This is the other Roma tomato.  You can see the pole beans really climbing the railing from this pot.  Every pot has at least one or two of these beans climbing around.  I have not seen any bean flowers on these yet, so I will not have any beans for a while still.

This pot holds the heirloom tomato.  It has been flowering for a month now, at least.  It finally has two fruit set.  I just noticed them today.  I hope it starts really setting fruit now.  I can't wait to see how the fruit look when they are ripe. They are supposed to be purple and green and delicious.

They are still both really small, but I hope they grow quickly and large.

This is the eggplant which has also been flowering for quite a while without setting any fruit. I have tickled some flowers with a paint brush without any effect.

I take back everything I said about not believing in pinching back basil.  In the past when I pinched off basil blooms they just sent out more blooms and never another leaf, but not this time.  Look at this huge bush of cinnamon basil.  It sent out its first blossoms about two weeks after I transplanted it from the store.  Look at it now.

This pot has one pole bean and two hop plants.  From this far back all you can see is the bean.

Here you can see one of the hops peeking out from under the bean.

I lifted back the big bean leaves and here you can see the climbing stalks of the hops.

The hens and chicks are really filling up their pots and starting to send out little chicks.

I kind of freaked out when my basil started flowering, thinking that I would run out of basil before my tomatoes were ripe, so I planted eight of these small pots with several basil seed each. This is Thia basil.  I will have plenty of basil even after I thin these to a couple per pot.

Here are the seedlings up close.  Cute.

The patio garden has not been all fun and games, however.  I have a couple bad things to tell you about.  Have you ever heard of tomato end rot?  Well, my master gardener mother says it is very common in potted tomatoes.  It happens because the soil is allowed to dry to much between watering's.  It turns out that Roma tomatoes are especially susceptible.  I should have looked this up before I decided to plant three Roma tomatoes in containers on my porch this spring.  Check this out:

I know I am not alone in saying, "Gross!?!"  Well the only thing I can do is water them deeply and frequently and hope it is enough. 

Another problem I am fighting is aphids on my eggplant:

Eggplant flowers are beautiful.  I would grow this plant just for the flowers, but look at all the aphids.

They are covered.

This poor flower is drowning in aphids before it even has a chance to open.

These young shoots and buds are covered, too.

I tried bringing home lady bug eggs and larvae from the community garden.  They ate a lot and grew very fast, but didn't even make a dent.  The adults have flown away and I don't see any eggs left behind.  I also, later, tried soapy water like you read about in all the home garden books.  That seemed to help for a day or two, but now the aphids are back and worse than ever.  I have never had and aphid problem this bad that lasted this long  Usually after a while some kind of natural enemy moves in and starts getting the population explosion under control.

I will give the ladybug thing another try as soon as I find some more lady bug eggs at the garden or at work  Maybe I will find some syrphid fly larvae in the orchard I can bring home to eat the aphids.  

Hopefully, it will not be so long before my next post about the patio garden because things should start getting exciting soon with tomatoes to harvest and jalapeno peppers.  The next post will be about the community garden.