Wet Weather and the Balcony Garden

Overnight we have had rain, not a lot, just a light and steady smattering which means I won't have to water today and possibly even tomorrow (depending on if the sun comes out and if the wind stays away.) This gives me a good 20 minutes in my day in which to blog. With the final few memoirs for the thesis to be read and significant other work on my life has been busy. A little too busy for a regular blog and even too busy to remember to photograph things in a timely manner. Time management skills can only work for 24 hours in a day and until I master the art of getting 36 hours out of a day I will have to make to with these little snatches of spare time. But yay to now getting to post.

I love when it rains. Just look at the picture above of my lovely little chilli all covered in drops. Not only is the hand watering a non-necessity, I get to sit by my large windows and watch the rain fall onto the garden. Drops collecting on the green (and slightly yellow) plants, pooling into their soil. A few hours later they look taller, stronger, happier. Rain just has this natural boost for plants that they simply cannot get from tap and/or grey water. Mind you this summer has been the wettest on record, and it hasn't been that good for many gardeners and farmers. Some had their crops and top soil washed away while others like stone fruit growers were damaged by wind and hail. It has also caused a few problems in the little balcony garden, such as increased risk of powdery mildew, problematic pollination and issues with drainage. What are these problems, how have I gone about fixing them and what do these excessively watery days mean for balcony gardeners?

1. Powdery Mildew

In a warmish moist environment powdery mildew is pretty much a given. Zukes, Cukes and others in that family usually fall victim to it. The picture below shows the beginning of it on a yellow zucchini (if you strain your eyes.) White dots appears on leaves, under leaves and on stems. They slowly defoliate the plant and kill it.

Though hard to prevent it is pretty easy to control. I have always used a milk spray, one part whole milk (skim, lactose free which I have in my tea won't cut it, it has to be the full cream stuff) to 9 parts water. This ratio makes it work for my balcony garden though you might have to tweak it for yours. Spray all affected areas including the underside of leaves and stems on your plants in the morning and the evening and the powdery mildew tends to fix right up. It also helps to remove any really badly affected leaves and dispose of them (no composting of those or it wont help.) While the weather is favourable to powdery mildew you may have to keep spraying but it isn't too much hassle and the small amount of milk in it means it won't smell too bad.

2. Pollination Issues

Plants need to be pollinated to produce the good bits, the yummy bits, the foodie bits. The tassles from corn need to meet with the silks to make heads of corn. The eggplant and tomato flowers need to be shaken at just the right speed and at just the right time to mingle the male and female bits. For cucumbers and zucchinis you need to introduce Mr male flower to the bits of Mrs female flower (she is the one with the baby zuke or cuke attached) for anything to happen. Wet weather isn't good for this. Corn particularly wont set well in the rain. But what to do besides a backwards rain dance? The best policy is just to keep trying. Hand pollinate again and again. Perhaps save some of the bits like the corn tassles or the male flowers of cucurbits in the fridge overnight and then see if the weather has improved thus hand pollinate the next day. Rain doesn't completely stop pollination from happening, it just gets in the way. So when wet weather sets in practice some hand pollination and time it well, otherwise you mightn't get much from your balcony crops.

3. Drainage.

Drainage, good drainage that is, has to come from the very beginning. It can be rectified later on if needs be but it is tricky and some plants wont survive the move. My advice is make sure you have the right pot for the right thing, and make sure it is big enough. If it isn't a self watering pot make sure to include plenty of drainage holes. If these holes are only on the bottom then make sure the pot is up away from the ground or off a surface otherwise they get closed over. Make sure you have enough holes, but don't go overboard otherwise you will lose too much water. Plates underneath the pot are a great way to collect water but it is best to raise your pot off them again as otherwise it could lead to drainage issues.

The plant below, my lime tree, doesn't drain that well and at times the new growth will wilt when there is too much water (and indeed when there is too much sun but that is a whole different matter.) See how the supple green limbs are hanging loose in the picture below. That shows poor drainage.

In the bottom of your pots add things like stones or foam or something to add pockets for drainage. I prefer the latter as it is cheap, light and effective.

In this weather, for balconies, make sure your drainage pipes are clear of debris. Dirt, leaves and other bits a pieces can accumulate in them and black them making your balcony a virtual swimming pool and dooming your plants.

Overall these problems are seasonal, and not always a summer issue. But with the world's weather wildly changing it is good to know what to do in these times. Do you have any other issues that come with the wet weather? Any other solutions to the problems listed here?

Rainy Garden Bloggers Blooms Day

It is another lovely rainy Winter day here in Melbourne, so here are some things that are blooming in the balcony, in all their wettest splendour. It is all primroses, pansies and puddles out there.

We need the rain, given the whole drought concept here in Southern Australia, but I do wish I could coordinate my fertilising/seasol days better. I thought today would be drier, oooops. For more on Garden Bloggers Blooms Day head on over to May Dreams Gardens.

Epic Storms and Epic Fails

After three tries and three epic fails by my web browser over the past few days, I gave up completing this post yesterday. Grrr to the confines of using university internet and thus not my usual browser (there is a long story of useless IT in this grandparent of a university.) Stupid explorer (not my first choice but my only choice at present when at uni) gobbled up my first three tries, but hopefully the fourth will work. Over the weekend we had a rather epic storm, a ‘once in a hundred years’ type storm complete with hailstones the size of golfballs (and one, I swear, that hit tennis ball size.) Melbourne received quite a bit of damage. One of my cousin’s houses had one damaged window, another cousin scored eight broken windows! Fierce. The balcony garden did not escape unscathed, the succulents were whittled away into green sculptures with no ‘leaf’ left undamaged, the lemons were shorn clear off their branches, as too were a few habaneroes which I found on the opposite side of the balcony to their bush, the basil was stripped bare in places, several sunflowers were decapitated, the zucchini and cucumber and tomato dissolved into a puddle of browny-green mush and the leek seedlings were hit so hard most of their potting mix ended up on the bench not in the seedling pot!!!

But it is not all doom and gloom. The time has come for Autumn planting and this destruction gives me a good excuse to remove all the plants I should remove but might not have given they had a little life left in them (that was until the storm hit.) So it is out with the cukes and the zukes and the matos and the mess, and in with broccoli, snowpeas and more lettuce. The dead flowers will be replaced by an autumn sowing, most likely a random blue mix or gerberas. From destruction there will be new life. And if it manages to stop drizzling I might even be able to clean up the leaf litter too!

And I did manage to salvage some produce from before it hit, a zucchini and two ripe habaneroes. Pictures soon.

More Rain (sort of)

I am a bit obsessed about rain lately. Probably because of the lovely but atypical falls we have been experiencing. Gavin, over at the Greening of Gavin, has some great points to make about it. Looks like we will get more tonight. Sadly though only 5.6 mms dropped in the city, none overnight, and when I popped out to the Balcony Garden a little while ago I realised that I actually did need to water some of the tomato plants (who were wilting in the lack of water way.) Luckily with all this rain the water saving in the household has been a cinch so they were happily watered and look much healthier already.

In other news I recently receded back into my jigsaw puzzle habit. Ironically this one was entitled 'Raining Cats and Dogs'!

Love it!

Explosions of Rain

We have had a rather hot spell of late, broken by one large rainy day. Suffice to say I am sure it wasn't the heat that made the car pictured above explode outside my apartment the other week! Luckily everyone was OK in this incident, well everyone except the car, it was gutted. But back to the cooler, wetter bit, the rain.

What a joy it was this morning to wake to the sound of rain. Ok when you live in a multistorey apartment complex it isn't quite the same as during your childhood when the rain fell on a tin roof and made those wonderful loud noises. Indeed hearing the rain from my place is mostly symbolised by hearing wet tires on the road (the sound is more muffled.) Rain has so many benefits, the plants love it (tap water on water restriction days just doesn't cut it) and I love it because it means I don't have to water the garden which takes a while, and the water I have saved gets used another day (although I have to use it up at some point because it goes a bit manky after a while.) Looks like showers, thunderstorms, hail and rain are forecast for the new few days so enjoy this Spring weather Melbourne!

The great big greens in Mum's Garden

Another quick post about my lovely Mum's garden. When I was here in January I posted about her lovely, if not giant herbs and green. She still has lots of sage

and rosemary

She now has giant parsley too

And cos lettuce (i've been eating so much of it)

And silverbeet, which will go in tomorrow night's dinner.

So many lovely greens, which look great all covered in raindrops. It has been raining constantly since I arrived here - hope some was saved for my balcony garden in Melbourne!

A Little Precipitation

I just removed most of the half dead tomatoes from the balcony, a complete workout if I do say so myself. While I certainly wish to post on the fall out from the cull, I am a little too tired to bother at present. A hot bath, a glass of wine and my comfy pj's await me. However, first I will tell you about something that made me smile widely the other day.

I awoke the other morning to find the weather a little pluvious, with tiny droplets of moisture falling from the sky. It barely amounted to more than a millimetre but it felt such a welcome relief to the dry and dusty days that have haunted us this summer (and possibly in future summers to come)

After lazing in bed, with the blinds open watching the falling drops I dragged myself out onto the balcony to take a few pictures. In some you can barely tell it has been raining, but these few seem to do it justice.

The sunflower seedlings, in their race to see who can grow stronger first gulpined down the rain as it fell upon them. These two have since been seperated, they kept trying to muscle each other out and in the wake of the tomato cull one of them asked ever so kindly if he could jump ship into another pot.


The tomatoes clung to it also, though in vain, as most of these are now green waste.


The dirty windows pick up the rain, while my mother would be horrified at the fact they have not been cleaned this year, nay this century, at least they work to show the watery goodness.


As for the lemons, while you can't see the rain, you can see the aftermath, each droplet carrying its weight in dirt and depositing it oh so kindly on the plants.


Hopefully there is more where this came from

Hope

This was the picture that greeted me this morning, a rainbow on the balcony, just outside my bedroom window. It didn't stay long, but just enough seconds for me to roll over, grab the camera, and try to capture its beauty. It's small, but if you strain your eyes you can just make out a rainbow. A rainbow here means so much more than a dazzling array of colour. It signaled a break in the hot and dry conditions that have ravaged our state recently.

I won't complain about the heat, yes it is shriveling the local trees and causing an early autumn's worth of leaf drop, my tomatoes are sunmarked and many a small plant has spontaneously combusted on thew balcony. A friend described yesterday's intense heat as 'like aiming a hairdryer at one's face, and turning it on to full'. As I said though, I won't complain. For the loss of a few plants on the balcony pales into insignificance when I think of all the lives lost in the bushfires still raging in this state. The pictures of the devastation were the second image I saw today, after the rainbow that it. They are all over the news. Despite the mass coverage it is still pretty incomprehensible. I recieved a text from a friend this morning, letting me know that she was all right, and that her property remained intact. She said she could see the flames on the crest of her hill but luckily they remained at a distance. She also remarked on the eeriness of late afternoon yesterday, when the smoke became so thick it blanketed her property and day became night. However she escaped, hence the horrifyingly poetic text message. Other people, many other people, were not so lucky.

So instead of whinging about my paltry lost plants, I just look at that picture. Not of bushfire ravaged Victoria, but of the balcony rainbow. The rainbow that signals hope and regeneration. The rain that caused it was short lived, I think even calling it a shower is going overboard. But it is a beginning, it is a start, and it is a positive, and looking for the positives is how the balcony gardener works.

A Teeny Tiny Confession

I feel compelled to ask for absolution, the guilt is piling high, higher than any stake in the pots on the balcony can handle and i think letting it out in print will be the only thing to right the wrong that unfolded the other evening.

In drought addled Melbourne we have water restrictions, a necessary evil to keep water use at an almost acceptable level (though i do feel more could be done - i mean our upstairs neighbours have the world's longest showers which really are using most of Melbourne's water supply daily!!!) However i must admit, i was an inadvertant culprit one night. We do the usual tricks in our place, saving the warm up water, the veggie washing water and all those glasses of water that pile up when i am working tend to end up on the plants if i feel they are all too stale for my precious tastes.

Now one night, in the not so distant past i went out for a bite to eat with friends (Yummy food, frum Ghurka's on Lygon, highly recommended) and managed to imbibe a fair amount of wine at the same time. One would probably be inclined to call me pretty amusingly intoxicated. Euphoric a friend and i ventured home - to find the daytime sun had seriously dried out the balcony paradise. In my drunken delirium i proceeded to dump all the household water i could find on the plants (no true thought as to how bad overwatering could also be) I blame that last glass of red but for some reason i accidently supplemented this watering can frenzy with some evian from the tap. What's worse was with my impaired judgement a major overwatering was a given, and inebriated friend and i almost ended up jumping puddles in the balcony.

Ooopssssssss

Most people complain about a drunk dial, or a drunken fling, and once i had a friend who drunkenly stole a cactus but i've never heard a tale about a drunken watering binge

At least i didn't water them with the pinot noir!

But what was worse than accidently drunkenly breaking water restriction ... 5 minutes later the storm clouds swarmed in and dumped a fair amount of rain on the balcony (cooool lightening too). Overwater from my glove and overwater from above.

So there it it - my confession! I feel no less guilty, but hopefully next time i have a tipple i won't reach for the wateringcan.