Trying to get a clear overview of this past year’s garden is like trying to recreate in the kitchen a meal fantastically dreamed.  I have a hazy overview, a generally very positive impression of events, and a real desire to recreate it, but most of the essential details completely elude me now: I made something according (at least in part) to some recipe (source now lost), I remember enjoying it a lot, I probably snapped photos and talked about it at length with friends/fellow gardening geeks — but, for the life of me, I can’t remember how, exactly, it all went down.

Now, in the deep of winter, I’m craving some very exact and detailed memories from the garden. Because, in planning next year’s garden, I’m trying to hash out all the hits and misses, every step I need to take, along with those I’d best never, ever try again.

As of this morning, that urge has become a totally unruly and aggressively boring spreadsheet of succession planting. (Insert plant name, insert days to maturity, copy, paste, repeat.) I almost want to forget it all for another couple months, almost just want to scrap planning until I can realistically use the outdoors as a growing area and not as a deep freezer — almost, but then again, not quite. This year, you see, I have a newly outfitted laundry room for starting seedlings, and a tiny greenhouse on the balcony for coaxing them out into the weather. It’s not much, but it’s a lot more than I had at my disposal last spring, and so it feels like I have great potential to live up to, and fewer chances to fail.

Having thought better of presenting this turgid spreadsheet to the world, let’s continue on, instead, with a more free-form reflection on went wrong last year in the balcony garden, and what went right. If nothing else, it’ll be a start.

The “right” category is topped, no contest, by the peas — particularly since my in-ground peas were decimated by early-rising furred marauders. In the absence of a fenced plot, growing dwarf snap peas on the balcony turned out to be the only way to go. I guess peas don’t like being transplanted, but I actually had luck last year starting them in a paper grocery bag in the cold frame and then carefully transferring the whole shebang to a larger pot once the weather warmed. Plan is, do a similar thing this year, but earlier, and put those fluorescent lights and balcony greenhouse to use.

Last year’s second best discovery: ball carrots. I planted Tonda di Parigi from Fedco, but have recently slobbered over “Parmex” from The Cook’s Garden. Wherever you get them from, ball carrots are small, tasty orbs that win my heart for ease of use in the kitchen: there’s a lot less chopping involved in their prep. That’s why I’m going to persist in growing them again this year, because they weren’t easy; it was tough to hit the sweet-spot of regular moisture, fertilizing, and good growing temperature out on the balcony, which heats up to boiling very early in the summer. The only harvest to speak of came late last fall. For this year, the rough plan is: plant them in containers early, but not too early, and keep ‘em fed and watered so they’ll fill out quickly before the weather turns stifling.

The big fails last year? The sad little anti-garden of bush beans in a windowbox, which fizzled out early (I ate five, seven beans, tops), the unintentional “bonsai bloom garden” of stunted nasturtium, lavender, and marigolds, and, most regrettably, bush tomatoes felled completely by blight. I think I’ve given up growing Swiss chard in my balcony containers — they just need more soil than I’m willing to give ‘em, and get positively mummified in the heat out there.

Lettuce and greens, which neither did stunningly well nor failed outright, I will certainly grow again, along with alpine strawberries. Then, later this spring, I’ll start tomatoes indoors. Radishes will go in wherever there’s space and shade in a pot — my only ambition for radishes this year is to have a show-off crop late in the fall that we can eat in a festive Christmas salad.

<!– @page { margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } A:link { so-language: zxx } –>Time to pot-up the strawberries and figure out where to put the peas, radishes, and spinach that are overcrowding the propagation shelf: Ruthlessly give them up as a failed experiment already? Plate them for the table as “micro-greens”? Or perhaps continue to coddle them on into warmer days…

I believe I just wrote the answer.

Tags: balcony garden plan, container garden varieties, DIY grow lights, how to grow carrots, how to grow peas, how to grow strawberries, how to make a seed-starting shelf, small space vegetable garden, starting seeds indoors

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