The magic balcony
Gardening, barbeques, sunsets, shared times, solo hobbies, and nature at home.
I love nature, as you’ve seen in my stories. But I also love the comfort of home. In an ideal world I’d have a house with a huge garden with ample space for veggies, fruit trees, a greenhouse to grow young plants early before spring and even some tropical plants, an area for cacti and crassulaceas, an environment for orchids, another for ferns and mosses, … and also a pond, plus a rocky region for rocky plants, and probably more.
Just dreaming for the time being…
In lieu of all this, I have a balcony and a “family permit” to do in it whatever I want and fill it up with all the plants I want.
Year after year my balcony has hosted wildflowers of all the local kinds, it has been infested with marigolds and snapdragons, and this year it was the place of my edible garden project, right now taken over by tomatoes.
My balcony has experienced heat waves and snowstorms, and it has seen me doing barbeques and making hypertufa pottery. And planting, and composting. And relaxing while playing the guitar too!
A corner of open space and fresh air, in a flat
Just like a garden would provide, I transformed my balcony into a corner of quite wild nature. Thus it is a good place for afternoon relaxation, especially after a heavy storm. Also for summer breakfasts when it still feels cool as the sun is not yet crushing on it. For barbeques, for evening meditations. For hobbies, for gardening. For life.
Our particular balcony is very open to the sky, without any roof on top. And it faces the exact SouthWest, so it provides stunning sunsets all year round. We can see how in winter the Sun sets bythe South and in summer by the very West, even somewhat North. Yes, sunsets look quite different in different times of the year. And always spectacular.
Because our balcony has no roof, we get quite some snow in the winter, rainwater during the whole year, and a front seat to enjoy the summer and winter storms. And enough sunlight to grow plants, as you may know if you follow me, including various edible veggies, fruits, and aromatics!
Another advantage of our balcony not having a roof is that we can cook barbeques even with fire as the Argentinian spirit mandates.
And before you ask, no, it’s not always meat. We sometimes (10% of the times?) “just” grill vegetables on an electric plate (sometimes in the fire too, as you see in one of the six photos above). Here, for example, I was cooking asparagus and zucchinis on a late spring evening:
Gardening and even growing some food
That last photo was from this story:
Which is part of a long collection were I’m documenting my first attempt at an edible garden in a balcony. That’s a project I started from scratch, up from the compost. I have many interesting stories, but will leave here 4 key stories that have further links inside:
The pond
An improvised pond made from a plastic box serves as a water reservoir to rapidly water plants. Also birds profit from it, as we don’t add any chlorine to the water (indeed a substantial refill of the pond is just from rainwater). And, looking from the right angles that minimize the ugly look of the plastic, the pond improves the wild feel of the jungles that grow with little control during the summer.
I especially like it when plants grow crazy around this pond, because then it looks more natural:
One summer the pond got infested with tadpoles. I have no idea how they made it to the heights of our flat! Unluckily, I couldn’t get any decent photographs to share… I’ll make an extra effort to document this if it happens again.
And even in winter, the pond looks nice, I’d say:
Wildlife in the balcony
Depending on the time of the year, different (wild)flowers will take over the balcony:
The balcony is also full of life from kingdoms other than plants. Bacteria, of course (and which we don’t see, of course again), lots of insects and other creatures that live in the soil (ants, worms, snails, etc.).
Flowers attract bees, among them leafcutter bees that this summer decided to leave in my pots:
And you? Do you have a garden, a balcony, perhaps a huge farm for yourself?
I’m curious to know how you relate with nature at home.
www.lucianoabriata.com I write and photoshoot about everything that lies in my broad sphere of interests: nature, science, technology, programming, etc. Become a Medium member to access all its stories (affiliate links of the platform for which I get small revenues without cost to you) and subscribe to get my new stories by email. To consult about small jobs check my services page here. You can contact me here.