Plants in the most Unlikely Places

Are those plants growing under your bookshelves in your kitchen?  Well, yes, actually.  

We bought a grow light from a local hydroponics store and attached it to the bottom of our kitchen counter.  We put up aluminum foil reflectors that got in place around the counter for when the light comes on at night (it's on a timer).  It's been great and we've had some excellent salads plucked right from our kitchen.  Those are self-watering containers from the balcony moving in for the winter.

One of the reasons we chose to use a grow light is because our windows become prime real estate for already existing plants.   I'm even beginning some tomato starts in here in the very middle.  Romaine, kale, spinach, chard, and a variety of microgreens are growing happily in this little environment.

Outsmarting Jack Frost

"Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart."

  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks


We are about to have a hard frost -- a very hard frost for a garden that had so many 80 degrees days to waken it up just a week earlier!  Check out the weather forecast through NOAA's weather.gov for Boston:

But, being a small gardener on a balcony, I have ways of combatting that sneaky Jack Frost, such as:

Bring all the plants into the warm kitchen for the night!!  
An incredibly patient husband is also recommended to accomplish this feat...  

"Yep, Allison," you might say, "You really fill that balcony full of plants."  To which I will say, "Well, um, there's actually a few more around the corner.... We kind of have a lot of plants.


Don't worry!  I'm married to an engineer who double and triple checked the weight our balcony can handle for me.  I have a good one!  (I'll let you decide whether I mean the balcony or James)

In an outside, larger, and in-ground garden it's much harder to combat a frost like this if you have plants already growing outside.  Putting down mulch or hay is a good way to protect your garden.  Even a cloth barrier might help such as burlap or reemay (a light-permeable, mesh fabric).  Lucky us, we have a big enough kitchen.    

Early Spring Harvest

We've had such a warm winter!  With temperatures in the 80's all last week (in March!), it's been quite something and almost impossible to keep the plants from looking amazing.   The magnolias and cherry blossoms are out.  The following is a nice balcony harvest of kale, chard, and some sprouts collected earlier this week.  We made a stir fry with these tasty greens.

 "The love of gardening is a seed once sown that never dies." -- Gertrude Jekyll 

Just Beginning to Bloom

"Earth laughs in flower."-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here's our peach tree blooming in March!  Such a treat to see these flowers so early in the season.  I'm looking forward to those mouthwateringly fragrant peaches come summer!

First Day of Spring on the Balcony

The balcony garden, I will admit, is a little crowded.  There are watering cans and containers of soil and  and some old plants that somehow survived our impressively mild winter.  Here's some of the highlights:

You can see the watering can next to the door all primed and ready to go for the season!  Most of these containers are self-watering ones we made a few years ago.  They are still holding up pretty well.  We just added some compost (from our worms) and some all-purpose organic fertilizer.  They are seeded in with some radishes, peas, greens, lettuces, and scallions that have not yet come up.

Here we've got some lovely chard and ... potatoes?  already?!  Yes.  Potatoes.  I am trying them again.  I think that perhaps being in a self-watering container might help give them the water they need when they need it without over-saturating the soil.  So far so good.

Finally, here's my garlic!  So exciting.  It just started coming up a few weeks ago.  I planted it a bit late this year (beginning of January... instead of end of November).  Let's see how it does. 

Happy First Day of Spring!

Is That Made Out Of... Gingerbread?

"It's a bird.... it's a plane... it's a car containing an exact-size model of Christ Church in Andover out of gingerbread!  Huh." 

    I know, I know.  Exactly what you would have said, too, if you had seen this being loaded into a zipcar one lovely Sunday morning back in the fall of 2010.  

Those are replica stained glass windows out of handmade lollipop...  yes, I know, we're nerds.  But you have to admit it looks really cool?!

James and I have a thing for building churches out of gingerbread.  We've done five to date for different fundraisers that happen from time to time.  Believe it or not, gingerbread is how we first met.  At least, close to how we first met... right up there with making ice lenses and patching holes in a rooftop skylight while listening to Phantom of the Opera.  But that story is for another blog post...

A Bee's First Look at the World

Here's a picture we took last year at one of our hives.  It's a drone (a male bee) emerging into the world.   Isn't he just so fuzzy!?  How fuzzy a bee is helps the beekeeper know how old he/she is.  The fuzzier, the younger he/she is.

A worker bee (female with smaller body, head and eyes) is helping the drone out of his comb cell.  If you look close you can see her actually chewing the wax off and the drone's head just beginning to poke out.  One way you can tell drones apart is that they have bigger squarish bodies and big eyes that almost meet at the top of their heads.  All the bees in the background are workers.  The bumps of wax above and to the left of the young drone whose emerging are other drones who have not yet "hatched".

Pretty cool, eh?  AND SO FUZZY!

Heart Healthy Scones

If you are interested in some incredibly yummy baked goods... check out the Flour Cookbook from the Flour Bakery in Boston!  I got the cookbook for James last year and he's been cooking through it!  

Apricots, ginger, cranberries, blueberries, toasted nuts.  It's good!  And an easy recipe for making variations.  And that lovely vanilla glaze... awh, so yummy!  And they're "heart-healthy" ... well heart-healthy for scones, that is.  What's not to love?

Pretty Bees

Last year we got this lovely picture of a bee on a nasturtium flower on our balcony.  Something about this picture makes me smile.  

If we are cooking with local honey or making jam we sometimes get these fuzzy visitors at the windows.  They seem to be able to smell what we have cooking in the kitchen from who knows how far away and come to check it out.  Once, when we noticed a few of these visitors peeking in the windows, we left a little bowl of jam at the base of an open window and a few bees would come several times in a hour with a productive, soft and seemingly happy humming sound to lick up the sweetened fruit.

We can't have a bird feeder off the balcony (due to seeds falling on our neighbors and passerby traffic below) but, that day, we found we can have a bee feeder.  Hmm... rather than binoculars to look at the winged visitors coming to the feeder, you probably need a magnifying glass.

Pruning the Peach Tree

Time to prune our peach tree that lives on the balcony!  This is our third spring with the peach tree. We decided the tree really need more root space.   Here's me all excited about the prospect of doing this on the kitchen floor.  

I first had to get it out of the container it was in.  Surprisingly, not an easy task.  Especially in the kitchen...

Success!  You can see how rootbound the peach tree was in that litte container.  Mind you, little = 18 gallons.  Notice how the root system is holding the shape of the container even after being gently tugged out of it!

Then, some light pruning to get it into shape.  We want the branches spaced nicely apart to give it as much air flow and sun into the very center. 

Moving it into a bigger container.  Just look at the size difference below between the blue and the gray!  The blue one is also a self-watering container so we can fill a water reservoir at the base (without drowning the roots) and let the tree slowly access that water over time.  The new container should hopefully help solve all the trouble we had with the soil drying out too quickly in the summer time.  

We planted in the tree, added lots of compost from our worms, some all-purpose fertilizer, some crushed egg shells (fruit trees need their calcium!), and a blend of microbes that help the plants access nutrients they might not otherwise have been able to access.  

James: "Nothing happened here.  Here's our kitchen.  Clean and tidy as ever."  

Just for the record, I did scrub down the floors after this to be extra clean and stay on my loving husband's good side.  

Oh, Carrots!

Sometimes carrots are just difficult.  

You are hoping for a weighty vegetable.  In fact, you see evidence that it could be big because there is a seemingly sizable orange top sticking out right above the surface of the earth... it looks ready.  But you really never know what you will get until you pull it out of the ground.

Oh, carrots!

Potatoes Have Flowers

Yes!  Believe it or not, potatoes do have flowers.  Some of you might think that's obvious, but if you haven't seen the plant, then there's really no reason you should know how they grow.  They are graceful, aren't they?  I took this picture in the early summer of 2010.  

And look at them on the balcony!  So tall!  (You can tell I was very proud of these plants).  The flowers mean that the potatoes are getting closer to harvest.  Once the plant flowers, goes to seed (yes, there are mini "fruits", too), the plant will begin to die back.  After that is about when they are ready to harvest.  In this picture below you can really see how they are 3 stories off the ground.  Awh, the joys of container growing!

Potato Flower

Potato flower

Graceful in your own small way

Petals fluttering

Potato flower

Signals a time of plenty

Harvest coming soon

Who would have guessed?

High above the ground below

Potato flowers

The Biggest of Them All!

When I started this growing-my-weight-in-food-on-a-third-floor-balcony challenge, I had some ideas about what would prove to be the heaviest of the veggies i grew.  Well, here are the all-time winners in grams.  

Tomato: 277 grams (Just shy of 2/3 of a pound)

Potato: 358 grams!  (or 0.79 lb, that's getting close to a pound!)

So clearly, potatoes and tomatoes must be the heaviest, right?  Well, almost.  I can only harvest tomatoes in the summer through fall, and although I had this one massive potato, my total potato harvest wasn't that big for that first season: 2.8 lbs.  I actually decided not to grow potatoes for the second season.  Lettuce, greens, and sprouts on the other hand, produce continuous harvest all year round and mature relatively quickly.  Surprisingly, the assortment of greens I grew landed second place.  The balcony might also have hit the limit for how many tomatoes it can grow.  But maybe new strategies are in order... hmm...

To date, I've grown the following amounts since beginning of 2010 when I started.  These are the weight winners - all the produce that grew more than a pound!   (Remember, this is a 3.5 x 9 ft space on a 3rd floor balcony grown with containers).

Tomatoes: 18,096 grams (39.9 lbs!)

Greens, Lettuces and Sprouts: 16,223 grams (35.8 lbs!)

Peaches: 3574 grams (7.9 lbs)

Cucumbers: 1914 grams (4.2 lbs)

Peppers: 1534 grams (3.4 lbs)

Potatoes: 1282 grams (2.8 lbs)

Radishes: 875 grams (1.9 lbs)

Carrots: 715 grams (1.6 lbs)

Pretty interesting data, no?  Well, to be fair, as things proved to be less weighty (and/or took a LONG time to mature), I grew them less.  This is definitely true for the carrots which took an incredibly long time (3 months!) to grow to 30 grams in weight!   

And to be fair, balcony growing is tough.  The plants are more prone to being stressed.  Especially if we were to leave on vacation for a week just before an unbelievable heat wave that is really the time that the peach tree needs the most water to grow big peaches... oh well, these things happen.  Such is life.  

A Welcome Little Visitor

Two winters ago we had a few aphids on some of our indoor houseplants.  Then one day we just spotted this tiny little creature on one of the leaves of our plants.  I watched him for awhile, and saw him go up to an aphid, sting it, then go in search of another.  The little bug was about the size of a head of a pin, hardly noticeable, especially if you weren't looking for him.

We found out later that this guy was a tiny parasitic wasp.  Sounds scary, but these little guys are actually amazing beneficial insects.  Greenhouses order millions of these in packages through the mail and release them in their greenhouses to take care of small soft-bodied pests like aphids and whiteflies.  They have no ill effect on humans and the populations simply die down if there are no more pests to support them. 

We thought ourselves very lucky to get this picture and to have a beneficial ally fighting for our plants' health and survival alongside us.  An ally is an ally, no matter how small!

Our First Gingerbread Church

Here's our first stab at making a gingerbread church in the fall of 2008.  A proof of concept, you might say.  We were testing out structure and trying to find a way to do stained glass windows.  Here we are creating the base.  The stained glass windows in the picture below are from crushed hard candies.

The stained glass window attempts here were colored sugar.  We tried to blow-torch them with a mini creme brulee torch, but the sugar started to burn... kind of like in a creme brulee, come to think of it!

We wanted to see if we could do a basic tower that our gingerbread base's roof could support.  Lots of frosting to hold it together. 

And it worked!  More or less.  Really not too bad for a first attempt.

You might have noticed that the cookie didn't look much like gingerbread.  I was trying out a pale gingerbread recipe that used corn syrup instead of molasses.  It created one of the stiffest doughs I've ever had to work with.  The book I got it from said, "No worries.  The dough is tough to work with."

I believed the recipe.  No reason not to?  It took me over an hour just to roll out the dough to make these shapes... not including baking or cutting the shapes themselves.  It was unbelievably hard.  No chilling-the-dough-to-make-it-stiffer necessary on this recipe!   My arms were a little tired from all the rolling, and when at last I had all the shapes I needed, I just managed to bunch the remainder of the dough into a "ball" and wrapped it in saran wrap.  Phew!  Gingerbread has no eggs in it, and I wasn't exactly going to chill it and make it more difficult to work with.  It was winter after all, and our apartment was nice and drafty.  So I left the wrapped dough ball on the counter to be used again in a day or two.

The next day James stumbled across it as we were testing out another recipe  "What is this?" he said waving it around, "It's as hard as a rock."

"Gingerbread dough,"  I said, rubbing one of my sore upper arms, "I'm trying out a new recipe.  It's supposed to be hard."

"Hard?  I bet I could hammer a nail into the wall with this!"

"Don't be silly.  No you couldn't."

With only a raise of an eyebrow and a small smile, he went into the other room, dug through his tool box until he found a nail and a calendar that we'd been meaning to hang up for awhile.

And then he proceeded to bang the nail straight into the wall with the ball of cookie dough right in front of me with no trouble at all!

I stood there, dumfounded.  And you know what?  There wasn't a single dent in the dough where it had hammered the nail into the wall.

"You made that church out of this?"

I nodded, a bewildered smile stretching across my face.

"And rolled out all those pieces with this dough?"

"Seems so!  No wonder my arms hurt!" We both began to laugh.

Goes to say, we've gotten better at gingerbread since then.  Not to mention, got a new recipe.  But you'll have to wait for another post to see some of the later gingerbread creations!