The Return of High Garden
One of my favourite things about summer is growing food on my balcony – I like to refer to my little balcony oasis as High Garden (as my condo is on the 10th floor and I’m a Game of Thrones fan.)
And my garden seems to get bigger and better every year. This year we actually are fertilizing on the regular and, who knew?, fertilizing really helps the plants grow ((The answer is everybody. Everybody knew.)).
This year we decided to plant a few vegetables:
- tomatoes
- cucumbers
- onions
- potatoes
- spinach
and some herbs:
- rosemary
- chives
- thyme
- marjoram
- savory
- mint
- oregano
- dill
- parsley
and, of course, the cat garden:
- cat grass
- cat mint
- cat nip
Planted on May 15, 2018:
June 16:
June 26:
June 28:
We’ve been eating herbs all throughout the summer – I use them in homemade salad dressing, scrambled eggs, with various meats on the BBQ, etc. We managed to get enough dill to make a delicious dill dip, but then the dill plant died. The savoury plant looked pretty grim from the time we planted it and never really took. The parsley, which I planted from seed (all the rest were seedlings), didn’t grow at all.
The cucumber plant ended up only yielding two cucumbers, but they were big:
The spinach plants yielded enough to make a small spinach salad for each of us (I’m not convinced it was more than the amount of spinach leaves on the seedlings we originally planted!):
Last week when my friend Kim and her boyfriend Tad came over for dinner, we made mint juleps with mint from High Garden:
Yes, I realize that those are Moscow mule mugs, not mint julep cups. I don’t have any mint julep cups, so the mule mugs had to suffice! And suffice they did – they were pretty darn tasty – a very refreshing drink on a hot day!
Tonight’s dinner included these three potatoes (which popped up above the surface – there are still more to harvest):
and this onion was sautéed to go with our steaks:
All in all, I’d say it was a successful growing season for High Garden. I’m kind of sad that summer is coming to an end though (as evidenced by leaves on trees changing colour and Halloween candy appearing in the local grocery stores) – I’ll have to enjoy the last bit of my garden while I can!
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