Aug 20 2008
Our Container Garden
It’s getting to be Fall, and our plants are drooping with fruit. Well, they’re not really drooping, and most of them aren’t really fruiting too much.
Our Brandywine tomato plant, despite its lack of sun, is managing to ripen several fruits. The flavor of the tomato is incredible… umami to the extreme.
Our cayenne is producing like crazy. We’ve gotten close to twenty peppers off it already, and it’s showing no signs of slowing. The peppers are pretty dang hot and we’ve used them to pickle milder peppers, in salsa, and to make our own vinegar hot-sauce with jalapeños (which is, if I can say so, pretty darn tasty.)
Our Ace bell pepper plant is producing very small fruit that are suffering moderately from blossom end rot. We cut off the yucky parts and eat the rest, but it’s obvious our plants aren’t getting enough sun. Both our Brandywine and Ace plants are producing much smaller fruit than we expected because they don’t have the light resources to do otherwise.
Our miniature lemon tree currently has two stems worth of bunches of flower buds. I am so pumped about this.
Our mint plant has suffered in the heat, but is doing okay. Our oregano plant is well, our basil plant is long-dead and my lavender has new growth despite needing a bigger container and browning a little from the heat.
Next year, we’ll grow some more cayennes and maybe some other smaller peppers. Habaneros could be nice. No more bell peppers and no more big or medium tomatoes. We just don’t have enough sun. I’d like to expand the herb selection and maybe grow some greens.
As far as our experiment into gardening on a balcony goes, I think we did well for year one. We’ll just have to be a bit smarter with our selections for year two.