Tomatoes everywhere and nowhere

It had to happen sooner or later, the frostyness of this early onset cooler weather, the calculations that if I pulled them now I would have time for a carrot crop before the spring planting, and the advancing wilt meant the yesterday the last few remaining tomatoes left the balcony garden. The tomato tree, contained white tomatoes. Except as you can see in this picture they were all pretty green.


They are now lined up on the window sill (along with 2 in the fruit basket next to elderly bananas and one on my bedroom bedside table by the window just for good luck.)


Hopefully all will turn, in due course, to a ripe yellowish-white. I thought with despair that none will ever ripen but then I noticed an odd yellowish round thing under the cactus bowl. I pulled it out and low and behold it was a ripening white tomato. Turns out he was one I had pulled a couple of weeks ago, just to see if it would work better inside, then promptly forgot about him when he decided to hide under the cactus bowl! The colours are a bit funny in the flash photo so I included both for contrast. Yellower than some white tomatoes but he still counts as a white tomato to me.


Now he looks like this, not shiny really, but good enough to eat! Let's hope the others can ripen like this too. Taste test results will be in soon. Yet for now, outside on the balcony garden there are no more tomatoes. Zilch, nothing. It is a tomato free environment. Yet all is not really as it seems. Inside, over the last month, I've been growing some tomato seedlings. Siberian tomatoes. At one point they looked like this, growing in all directions. (beleive it or not that funny one is growing AWAY from the sun!!!)


Now they are a bit bigger and, in a week or so, I am going to plant the two best ones in their own pot. Now you might think I am a bit nutty, tomatoes don't grow outside in winter. You may also think Oh Prue, siberian tomatoes may fruit at a colder temperature but they still can't grow outside in winter. Well these tomatoes are NOT going outside. The strawberries on the window sill will be moved to make way for the indoor tomato experiment. I am hoping with the warmth of the room and the large amount of afternoon sun these siberian tomatoes might just give me home grown yumminess over the winter. I'll keep you posted, but for now, I've left this guy in charge!

Gazanias

Don't you just love value for money. A $2 impulse buy months ago has keep me in yellowy goodness ever since! The flower collection in the balcony garden is constantly reducing and expanding as annuals die off, or get neglected to the point of failure and I replace them with the next exciting thing. At least then I get to buy plants on a whim and fill the balcony with colour amongst the vegetables. A while back I purchased this lovely yellow Gazania that keeps on flowering like you would not believe.


Then I added a reddish Gazania to the collection (I have struggled to photograph it well so these will have to do) Less flowers but such a lovely red.


Wonder how long until I kill both of them!?! I also wonder, are there any more colours I can add???

two degrees overnight means ...

... Tomatoes go bye bye! It is unseasonably cold here in Melbourne. Well ok it is Melbourne and cold weather is pretty much its claim to fame. Still it is still only April (just) and the record cold morning this morning of 2 degrees is far too chilly, far too early! The scarily early cold snap means one thing. We must wave farewell to the almost ripened but just not quite there White Cloud tomato.


I will pick all the little green ones and hope that they somehow ripen inside. Warmth and a good old banana will probably help there. All I want to do it try one, must one, from this struggler of a plant. It survived a heatwave as a young plant and a wilt as it got older.


Now it has to battle 2 degree mornings with semi frost. Sorry my friend, little aussie battler that you are, the compost (or, more likely the bin as I have no compost) will have to be your new home. Until next spring ...

Lunchtime in the Balcony Garden

The carrots, lettuce, tomatoes and other goodies have been going into my lunchbox of late. Of course working at the uni I don't get to enjoy the balcony garden view while eating the balcony garden treats. Someone, or something, however, has enjoyed both the garden view AND my purple sprouting broccoli


Any idea of who the hungry hungry culprit is????

Cactusland

It's a showery kind of day today and I am spending most of it teaching, making it a very indoorsy sort of day. Therefore this is going to be a very indoorsy sort of post as I aim to focus on the few cacti and succulents that exist inside my house. One of my earliest posts dealt with one of my first ever house plants, a cactus fondly named Mr Floppy. Mr Floppy got a bit big for himself and got the chop sometime later. He has grown again and continues to flop a little, but never quite the same as before.


Other cacti inside include a little collection, which I gave to my housemate way back when she lived somewhere else (to brighten up her window sill) It now brightens up our window, but I will be sad when she moves and takes this little collection with her. May just have to invest in one of my own (from the Cactus man at the Vic Markets, he is a legend in his own boots).


We have this succulent, pictured earlier behind Mr Floppy that has now grown towards the sun and sunk some form of roots into Mr Floppy's pot! Mr Floppy has a stalker perhaps, or at least an admirer, or at worst a potential parasitic bunny boiler. Either way it is a pretty cool succulent. Next to it is the one pictured below, a sprawling mini cacti.


I love my little Cactusland - they represent some of the earliest balcony garden collections. Let's see what more can be added over the next few years!

Simultaneous baked bean indulgences

I thought for a moment over the weekend that maybe, just maybe everyone household in Melbourne has eaten baked beans for breakfast, but I guess the strong winds really were just the vengeance of mother nature. The balcony garden was blown all over its 2nd storey home, with stakes the only things holding the sunflowers in place. Indeed, when I walked to the markets I noticed a very particular sunflower petal 200 metres down the road. It looked like it belonged to my wind battered friend but surely it couldn't have flown this far intact!?! Lying a metre away from it was a petal from a very red geranium, the same kind from the balcony garden, and a very unsual one at that. Maybe the wind did carry the poor petals all this way! It was reallllllllllllllllly strong.


Luckily today it has died down, and I managed to get outside to check on the carnage. I thought to my horror 'oh my god one of the basil pots has blown away'!!! It seemed unlikely but maybe the oversized basil elaves had acted as wings and lifted the pot off the ground, sending ot soaring into the stratosphere. Shows i'm having memory problems, because I realised, after a bout of panic (thinking that said pot may have blown a pedestrian unconscious anywhere between my place and Geelong) that we had indulged in pesto pasta last night, and the aforementioned wandering basil was long past being digested. Oooopsss. It's getting frosty and the basil is on its way out, hence the pesto. As for the memory lapse ...


So looks like with this early very cold weather the last of the tomatoes are going to have to be picked also, let's hope I can ripen them inside. That and I have one more large pot of basil which will make some nice freezer destined pesto. The other upside ... it is now time for a late autumn planting! More beetroot, carrots and snow peas, here we come!!!

Cosmic and Dragon Purple carrots

As we battle on from post 100 I realised that there was a photo contained within it that had not previously been printed. This post is to rectify that, and to expand upon my newfound obsession (I seem to have a new one every day!) ... purple carrots. I planted two varieties a few months ago at the end of the summer heatwave. One was cosmic purple, the other purple dragon, both promising purple carroty goodness. For the past few weeks I have been harvesting small purple carrots.


I should let them grow bigger but I simply love eating them,and showing them to guests so each time someone visits or I get peckish another carrot bites the dust. I've already cleared one pot, which now houses snow peas! One pot to go, and the number of those reamining has now hit single digits. At least I proved that you can grow full size carrots in a pot! My favourite is to put them in salads, like this one here. Carroty yumminess!


People at uni have been most amused by my 'oddly coloured carrots' in my lunchbox. I have now planted yellow carrots and white carrots and more purple carrot in the hope they will provide me with a lovely autumn/early winter harvest of colourful goodness. I got into a conversation in the lift at uni the other day with a woman about white carrots. She thought I had confused them with parsnips, but I assured her I wasn't mistaken and that indeed you could get white carrots that were not parsnips in disguise. I should hunt her down when they grow bigger and give her one. In the meantime can anyone elighten me on the taste of white, or yellow carrots? Are they very different to their purple or orange counterparts?

Centenerific

100 Posts! Time to celebrate with 100 of my favourite balcony garden pics! Ok maybe not 100, but 11 will do. Thanks for reading along and hope the next 100 are slightly less inept!

Strawberry Delight

This way to the strawberry patch. Well when I say patch I really mean two, in a pot, in my window. They started off very small sometime last September when, on a whim, i purchased two Lowanna strawberry seedlings and decided they were just the thing for a window box for a few months.


Well a few months turned into many more months and these things are fantastic. I wonder how many strawberries they have produced over those months??? - time for the berry mathematics.
So they usually produce about 3 fruit between them each week. Doesn't sound like a lot.


Times that by the 30 or so weeks between October and now (of course they didn't fruit in the first month)


That's 90 strawberries! Wow, how many punnets would that be? Ok enough maths. And they show no signs of stopping. At one point I threatened to pull them out, they were in the way of my indoor tomato plant plans. But a severely wilted tomato and a persistent strawberry meant they stayed, and boy did they thrive. Keep up the good work little strawberries, and then I can keep enjoying my TV watching impromptu snack, straight from the plant itself (ode to indoor plants)

Look who came out to play again

Back in January Mum's volunteer sunflower flowered. It was stunning, and inspired me to plant a sunflower on the balcony. I wondered whether it was possible, but Fern from Life on the Balcony assured me that it was certainly possible and definitely enjoyable. I planted out a few seeds, hoping one would germinate. Low and behold they all did.


So i kept two for the balcony garden and gave the others away. I know that one has grown a head in one friend's garden while the other two should be growing nicely. The two in my garden are at very different stages. One is about to form a head, a single, lovely, head.


The other, well he is a bit of a mutant. He had one, then three, then seven and now 9 possible heads, about three of which are on top of the main stem.



Late last week one of the heads began to grow, the promise of tiny petals poking through.


Each day since he has opened up a little more, unfurling to show me his yellow mottled with burnt sienna centre. I always loved the burnt sienna crayon, now I get to have it in flower! Awesomeness.


And then today, he reached the pinnacle, he looked like this.


And you can see him from the other side of the street! What a stunner! I had to stake them both during very high winds last week and I think with the promise of continued blustery conditions I may just keep them that way. Now to wait for the other 8 heads to open and see what he looks like in all his glory.