Balcony Gardening バルコニーガーデニング

Adventures in balcony gardening

I'm going to start this by saying that I am far from being an expert at this. In fact, I'm quite amazed that my vegetables make it to blossom.

Reasons for starting a balcony garden

Japanese Shishito pepper

My goal of growing a garden on my balcony is one, to keep the cost of buying vegetables down and also to ensure that what I'm eating and feeding to my family is organic and without the pesticides often used here. Last year was my first year to try in earnest and I was fairly successful. Tomatoes, string beans, cucumbers, and Japanese shishito peppers. Shishito look like Jalepeno peppers but tend to be sweeter but that could be because they are usually picked before they turn spicy.

Of last years losers were my bell peppers, red and yellow, and my habeneros. Seems I started them a bit late and the summer heat was too much for them while they were small. I did get one pepper that stayed and grew on the yellow but it didn't ripen. That was in late October early November. We actually got some frost last year so that didn't work.

Kabuto beetle larva, one of eight

The big surprise

  This year started with a surprise. I actually started planting earlier, end of March, and when I went to put my cukes into the deep planter, I found this:

What is it, you say? That is the larva of a kabuto beetle. If I were to sell them, I could get upwards of ¥3000 for one. I found eight in the planter before I stopped digging around. Unfortunately, all that digging around upset one of my Eda bean plants and it has yet to really recover. This morning, I took a look in the container that I had put the larva. I noticed yesterday that what appeared to be the tail end of one, had moved. Today, I found this little girl on the top of the soil.

The first female Kabuto to hatch

This year's sowing

Okay, back to the plants. This year, I've planted too kinds of tomatoes: marble and what was labeled catalina; cucumbers, string beans, eda beans, sweet peas, water crest, okra, habenero, shishito, red and yellow bell peppers, parsley, sweet basil, spearmint, peppermint, and rosemarie. These are all mixed in with a few flowering plants such as carnations, mini roses, five different cacti, and two others I have yet to identify.

Half of the balcony. The cover of the green house is off and all plants that came up have been transplanted.

Mini roses, spearmint, peppermint, & a mystery

Carnations, sweet basil, rosemarie

 

Problems on the balcony

After transplanting the parsley and okra, I soon had a problem. The only place that I can think of the origin is from some manure that I picked up from a different store. My okra were totally covered with APHIDS! Great, just what I wanted. Try a new plant and now I've got dozens of flies eating everything. Not only did I get aphids this year but my cukes have mold on them, and last week I found that my marble tomatoes have BER (Blossom End Rot). This morning I trimmed off the one branch that seems to have the rot. Hopefully the rot has not spread to the rest of the plant or my other tomato plant.