Plants of my balcony orchard thriving into the early, hot summer

You’ve already seen the small vegetable garden I’m growing in my balcony up from the very compost that I produced during the winter:

In my last update, a few new plants had arrived. Some bought, some gifted, some germinated… and I had my first salad with some of its plants:

Now, here’s a quick photo-update of what’s coming up.

Strawberries starting to ripen

With a lot of sun and temperatures reaching 28 and even 30 Celsius, strawberry fruits are growing and gaining color quite fast. In fact I ate my four first fruits today -but was too excited and didn’t take photos of them… so next time!

A cutting of red basil starting to like its place

As recommended by Inge E. Knudsen when she read that I was planning to get some basil plants, I asked a friend for a cutting of a plant he has. I planted it around a week ago, kept it under shadow to protect it from the sun, and I watered it every day. I think it’s liking its new place, because after suffering a bit during the first couple of days (leaves down…) it is now looking like this:

Indian cress just germinated

These new visitors popped up from a pack of seeds I bought for just 29 cents (incredibly cheap for Switzerland!). I found 7 plants, and a few more might come up, I guess.

Indian cress, or nasturtium, is edible, but I like it more for its flowers. Know more about this plant here.

Here you can see one of the plants growing in my own-made cement pot, and another growing in the wooden rack (also own-made, see previous stories). In the latter, it’s sharing space with a sage (that I attacked to eat some gnocchis with butter and sage… I will show you next time I cook this!) and some marigolds that are growing wild from the many plants I have each season.

A new tomato plant

A colleague from work had this for me. Apparently a “black” tomato. The plant broke as he was carrying it, but it seems to be surviving. We’ll see…

Plants that keep developing

Here are my recycled lettuce and the cucurbit that grew out of the compost:

There are some fallen snapdragon flowers, as you can see. That’s because, well, many of the pots in my balcony were taken over by it…

And here are some of the corn salad plants. These were in the shallower pots, and were clearly growing slower than those in deeper pots, so I moved them here where they should have plenty of space:

The other plants are growing very fast, so much that I think I’m going to have a salad for tonight’s or tomorrow’s dinner!

I wrote this story while having a refreshing drink from the forest:

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