Lets take a guided tour of how my balcony looks right now. It's of course not at it's prime this early in the season. In fact I haven't even re-planted the seedlings yet. If I do that too early I can't bring them in at night if it gets too cold.
My balcony is 3,5 x 1,5 meters (use
Convert-me.com if you're unfamiliar with the metric system), it's facing west (which gives me WAY too much sun sometimes and makes the balcony too hot for both me and some of the plants), it's "open" on two sides and the balcony upstairs works as a roof. I moved here in the end of the summer of -06 so this will be my third summer with the balcony.
The first summer I put up trellises along most of the long side and one of the short sides (the other consists of a concrete wall separating the balcony from my neighbor's balcony), added furniture and of course a bunch of flowers and plants as well. I don't have any perennials on my balcony though, or at least none that I can keep on the balcony over the winter, so I start over every year with new plants.
Lovely pansies/penséer from the summer of -07
I've made the decorative heart myself.
The second summer (last summer) was a really bad summer from a balcony point of view since I ended up living in the middle of a construction area when they decide to build a new bridge and re-build the road outside my balcony. Everything got covered with a THICK dirt layer and there were no point in even trying to keep things cleans since it got just as bad the next day. Yuck! (And all the heavy machinery and all the road workers didn't make things more fun)
I still had a few plants that summer, like runner beans/rosenbönor and sugar peas/sockerärtor on the trellises (a must!) but not much. I managed to get hold of white runner beans this year though which I like a lot better than the orangey red I had the first summer.
See the nice, dusty piles of dirt and gravel?
Messy road work area
These photos are taken around 2-3in the night when the jackdaws
gathered on the huge crane (all the little dots on the crane are birds).
You can imagined that I really longed for this summer when I would get my balcony back! They're not completely done with all the building work though, I believe they're going to build new houses on the other side of the railway (behind the red house), but I don't think that dust will reach me. *phew*
This year I've sown more runner beans (from the white flowering beans I got from last years harvest), sugar peas and sweet peas/luktärtor. I've also bought two tomato plants (no reason to sow them yourself when you only nee two plants), I've also got 2 pelargoniums/pelargoner that's survived the winter indoors, some spring flowers borrowed from my mom's garden (that I will return to her when they've stopped flowering) and some other stuff as well. I also plan to get more plants later on.
On the table I keep this years pansies (not as fancy colored as the first summer) the hydrangea/hortensia and a big bowl of spring flowers. You can also see the tomatoes that I've just bought but not re-planted yet.
My windowsill with pelargoniums (the red one is a birthday gift), parsley/persilja and a strawberry plant (I assume my Swedish friends understands the word strawberry so no translation needed LOL) And of course some of my beloved stones. LOL
A tangled mess of seedlings, runner beans and sugar peas
The plans for this summer is first of all to plant all the seedling, to add more plants and decorations and HOPEFULLY put in new wooden flooring on top of the ugly, cold concrete floor I have now. I also look forward to documenting the balcony in the blog and sharing it with you.
Oh in case you haven't already noticed this, I CAN be a bit longwinded from time to time. Consider yourself warned! LOL