Meanwhile, in the vegetable garden

The vegetable garden, 3 June:


The vegetable garden, 8 July:


The vegetable garden, 20 July:


Well. That ain't not bad, actually. I never thought the d-ed thing would produce anything, but there's quite a bit of greenery coming up. I even got to eat the spinach that are in the foreground in the middle photo.

The cool thing is, for the longest time, my garden looked like crap compared to everyone else's, but now it's starting to be one of the better-looking ones. Partly, I think it's because I'm actually there every day, or every other day at the latest. Some people seem to garden in fits, a few days once in a blue moon.

Another issue is fertilizing. Many people have been listening to The Local Garden Expert and adding nitrogen to their plants. Then some of them put way too much nitrogen and burned their plants. But either way, nitrogen is not the answer in a vegetable garden. Nitrogen grows leaves and stems. If you're after lettuce, that's a good thing, but if you want your plants to bear fruit, they need... well, I forget whether they need P or K, but that's what they need, not nitrogen. So I've been feeding my garden with tomato fertilizer, once a week, as per the manufacturer's directions, and it does seem to be working. Consider the following:


A pumpkin! First of all, last year I didn't even have my first flower until July 20, the first female bud was August 2, and the first growing fruit was August 19. So I'm doing well for time. Second, this vine does not have a pumpkin, it has four. This is the most developed one, and the others will get eliminated later on to leave only the top contender, but clearly, pumpkins like it way better out there than on my balcony.


Plus, it's colonizing the rest of the garden. Booya!

Then, there is this:


A Brussels sprout or cauliflower (they looked identical back then) on June 17.


A cauliflower yesterday, July 20. They don't have heads yet, but considering how minuscule and fragile they were when I bedded them out, I'm pretty impressed that they turned into such monsters.

Also:


The peas have pods, and some of them (such as this one) are starting to fill out.


The red onions seem to be doing well, though it's hard to tell since the important part is underground. Most of them you can't see anything, I just hadn't mounded this one yet.

And most importantly:


It looks like a jungle. If you ask me, that's the main point of a garden. (Someone described it as "artistic". I think she was trying to be diplomatic.)

Who are you, and what are you doing in my garden?

A pansy. Yes, it's a very crappy photo of a pansy, but that's not even the biggest problem. I planted several varieties of pansies. Expensive ones, might I add. Which I selected carefully from among the immense variety of pansies in my catalogs, because of their beauty. This is not one of them.

I don't know where this thing comes from, but it is NOT any of the pansies that I was expecting. I'm most aggravated. Especially because the dog has been quite determined to destroy all the pansies, and there might not be too many besides this one.

Poop.

At least the roses are well

The flower garden is not going at all according to plan, except this:


My J.P. Connell is in bloom, and doing very well, thank you. So that answers the first question: can roses get enough sun on my balcony?

The second and equally important question is: can roses survive the winter on my balcony? You see, the 4' x 4' x 15" flowerbeds with 2" ridig insulation on the bottom should theoretically provide a fair amount of insulation for my flowers, and therefore a fair chance of wintering, but in order to give the JP Connell the sunniest spot, I had to put it in the most exposed place, uncomfortably close to the windward corner of the flowerbed. Of course I'll add batt and mulch and anything else I can find, but I really have no idea whether it will live.

Baobab some day

Zadok is putting out some new leaves at the top. It's something baobabs do: first they shed all their leaves for the dry season, and then they leaf out before the first rains. Strange, eh? It rained on Monday after weeks of draught, and Zadok put leaves out ahead of that. And I was worried about its straggly appearance, until I looked at it from this angle and noticed it's got a bare trunk and a leafy crown, "just like a real baobab."

BOOYA!

Abimelek is behind Zadok and you can't see much of it because there isn't much to see, but it's still alive. Baobabs are not actually trees, but succulents, so when they die they decay completely and quickly instead of drying out. So as long as Abimelek has a trunk and isn't falling apart, I figure it's still alive, unlike, say, a mayday tree, which could be dead as a door nail and you wouldn't really know it.