How Does Your Garden Grow?

Well, the answer is – not too badly!

As you might imagine, having any sort of a garden on the fifth floor is not quite the same as the several hundred square metres that I have had in the past (and which is now turning in to jungle).
However it is possible and, apart from minor unpleasantries with wayward suicidal tomato plants, generally quite successful – I have a combination of window boxes and separate pots all hanging over the balcony rails. The ones overlooking the street catch the morning sun so tend to remain better watered than the south westerly ones at the back. These can get roasted very quickly. This year the sun came out with some strength on each occasion that I was absent from the flat. Result – healthy looking plants when I left were turned into wilted specimens on my return.

As the year went by I have emptied pots and replaced them with the next set of plants – usually after unwisely going into garden centres.
So the year started with bulbs being planted in the window boxes and just starting to poke their way through on this shot:

The hyacinths are sharing one of the bigger boixes with some crocii.

And a few weeks later the crocuses are just coming up in the small box they share with the lavender:

 
And then they came out:

 

A pot of trailing xx hangs outside the window – soon after I drilled the holes for the pot hangers.

Over the summer the pots and boxes at the back were home to a combination of cherry tomato plants and strawberries – but I didn’t seem to take any photos of them. A few weeks ago I decided that the time had come for the remains of the tomatos to come out and those strawberries that had survived were due for the chop. So I noow have boxes with winter flowers and some trailing vinca minor to add some greenery.

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and the view from the bedroom looks like this:

More gardening stuff later including ‘Bayleaf the Gardener’…..arrrrrrrgggghhhh…..

 Simon