I had some plants ready to be planted out, and the weather was allowing, so we planted them on the balcony around the 10th of June 2021. Some of the plants were long and lanky, others were not developed enough, but it grew and turned out to be a nice year of balcony growing for us. We got cucumbers, tomatoes, some lettuce, parsley, and a lot of pelargonium.
Pelargonium and garden lily. The garden lily is a survivor from the previous year. It overwintered in one of the balcony boxes, and was discovered when I was going to plant pelargons in it. After putting the bulbs of the lily in a pot, it grew up, and flowered beautifully. In this photo, it has not opened its flowers yet.
There’s still some soil left in the bag, with bokashi compost from last year. I ended up using it to fill two other planting boxes that were hung on top of the railing. There was also enough soil left to fill up the big planting box against the wall, seen in the left upper part of the image above. The soil was great and must have contained a lot of nutrients and things that the plants liked, because they grew very well in it.
On the table you can see our table tomato, it had a bit of a rough start at first, standing inside, not getting enough water, but after we put it out and tried to care for it a little bit better, it gave us tomatoes later in the summer. The tomatoes were very thin-skinned, sweet and juicy.
In front of the tomato on the table there is a mini sunflower. It was not cared for well and had to be thrown out.
Coleus
This coleus had three thick stems, grown from second generation cutlings from cutlings that I got from mom the previous autumn. It grew very well and was a nice decoration in the middle of the balcony windows.
Hanging pots
I was very pleased with the functionality and looks of the hanger for the hanging plant, which is a shelf holder from IKEA. The shape of the tip held the hanging pot’s hook and prevented it from sliding off. It secured it through some hard winds later in the summer and worked very well. We put up one at each side of the windows, at each end of the balcony.
The hanging pot with a pelargon on the wall was bought last year, with red roses in it. The roses did not make it the whole year, but the pot came to good use again this year anyway.
These hanging plants was bought at Granngården. They flowered most of the summer, at some point they stopped due to too little water when we had to go away for a few days, but they recoevered and started to flower again after a while.
Planting boxes
All three balcony boxes filled with pelargons.
Pelargons in a balcony box with self watering function in the bottom. They were a little too small and underdeveloped, but we wanted to have something in the balcony boxes, and these were what we had. They grew over the summer and looked decent after a while, but for next year I hope we can have a little sturdier plants to plant.
In the big planting box I planned to grow beans. I planted quite a lot directly in the soil, but none of them came up. Instead the box was dominated by the cucumber plants, number two and three in the back. The first one is a “bondböna”, that grew ok to start with, gave one bean, but was then totally eaten by some kind of larvae, butterly larvae is my guess. Thu cucumbers grew very well though, and gave us 7-10 cucumbers. The year of the beans has to be next year instead.
In the fornt are some welsh onions, that were in the plug box far too long before being planted here, but they recovered and actually survived and grew on.
Climbing plants
Mixed climbing vines. We started them indoors, in milkboxes filled with soil. We let them grow too lanky before we planted them outside and we had to untangle them, which probably damaged them quite a lot.
Tomatoes
The two cherry tomato plants. The container was filled with bokashi soil and the plants were put down as low as possible. They grew very well, became thick, strong and tall and gave a lot of tomatoes. The only problem I had was their support. Next time I need to have a better stronger support for them, perhaps using rope from the ceiling instead.