oh whoa when you were talking about how it was misshapen from needing light i didnt imagine it actually stretching towards the light like that
SO COOL
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oh my god i love you
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The building manager at my job is a super cool person. He’s a preacher (you’d never know it unless someone else told you which is how I found out), and he also races dirt bikes (another thing you’d never know). He’s just genuinely nice and the most personable person you could meet. Come to think of it, my student job in college involved working for a building manager who was also super chill. What’s the deal with that line of work and cool people? On topic, I did ask him about the plant policy once and he said they’re generally discouraged but he looks the other way.
found a slightly-confused wandering monster (local eco grocery gives away produce that’s gotten too lively)
seems to be happy in their new home
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i finally stole the succulents from the rich people apartment building wall
they’re cute, gonna get a fishbowl and find some moss
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incredible carrot
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Garden is coming up pretty well. There’s been a lot of rain the past month so it hasn’t really needed much attention either. The rows are green beans, summer squash, and carrots
The carrots mostly didn’t work out but 4 or 5 of them seem to still be holding on
It’s my first time doing this so I’m just happy to see anything growing
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I planted some broccoli a few weeks ago but neighborhood cats dug it up. I guess I’ll try it again and maybe put something up to protect it.
Cucumbers are doing well, though. I just picked a couple of them.
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My small cactus became top-heavy and tipped over entirely, so I cut off a few pads and now all of the pieces seem to be doing pretty well as independent plants.
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I did plant a second round of broccoli back when I said that, surrounded by random wooden stakes to discourage the cats. The plants are pretty large now but at the moment they all look like this.
I’ve heard that cold doesn’t affect broccoli. I guess I will see. I brought all my potted plants indoors the other night because they’d have been killed for sure.
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Ice Broccoli
A stalk of broccoli that is frozen, but never melts. Can only be used in battle.
50% frost resist
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i’ve heard that frost makes broccoli and kale all the sweeter! so look forward to these candied stalks
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Kale is the only other edible thing I am growing right now. It got plenty of frost, too.
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New tenant in the GameCube ruins. Don’t worry, the cactus I initially put in there is still doing just fine in a different pot.
When I brushed the dirt off following the transplant operation, I found that those dark spots remained and were part of the plant. It wasn’t until I took this photo that I noticed that they give it character.
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I grow plants! I have had some interesting plant adventures during the pandemic.
I live in Los Angeles and my place has a smallish balcony. Early in the pandemic, I’d been reading a lot about urban gardens and food sovereignty and I started to get interested in the idea of growing my own food on the balcony. It’s too small to feed me in any substantial way, but herbs are unbelievably expensive at the grocery store, and most of them have been engineered by humanity over thousands of years to be dead easy to grow, so that seemed doable.
I started growing herbs from seed, as well as regrowing green onions from grocery store stubs. I started out with just this:
And by midsummer my balcony looked like this:
I finished out last year with a cherry tomato plant, a whole bunch of little orange pepper bushes, a ton of sweet basil, oregano, chives, cilantro, mint, and parsley, and an ornamental thai pepper plant we are using to make our own chili powder. We were also making quite a lot of our own pesto with the basil and parsley. My husband and I also built a large bench from scratch and put it out there so we could enjoy the space. It looked like this:
However the most INTERESTING thing I’ve been doing with the plants is still ongoing. Around midsummer, after the success of my green onions, I got interested in the idea of pirating plants from the grocery store. I wanted to see how many different kinds of plants I could regrow from the vegetables I bought there.
I started by planting a garlic clove in a planter’s peanuts container. It grew quickly but I’d planted it at the wrong time of year so the summer heat eventually killed it. It did not grow a proper bunch of garlic, but merely transformed from one small clove… into one fatter clove. I ate it:
Then I tried regrowing a bok choy from the stub of one I’d purchased at the grocery store. It bolted and produced a huge number of flowers which eventually became seed pods. In August I let it dry out, then harvested the seeds by hand.
I ended up with this many seeds:
These bok choy are beasts–they sprout in about 4-5 days and grow incredibly fast. They’re great cold weather plants here in LA. I planted them in September and was able to eat them in November. I didn’t let them get as big as they could have, because I simply didn’t have the room, but it’s great to have free baby bok choy appear on my balcony during the winter. My husband and I made a time lapse of some of them growing:
I’m now planting my second round of bok choy seedlings to grow during the rest of the cold weather season. I’ve also got one huge gnarly bok choy I’m trying to let go to seed so that I can get a second generation of pirated bok choy seeds.
Right now the balcony is very lettuce-heavy, but I just planted a bunch of shishito peppers indoors today, as well as some ornamental thai chili seeds taken from the plant that’s still going strong on my balcony. So far I’m harvesting my own seeds for the thai peppers, the bok choy, as well as coriander, which should make this whole operation slightly cheaper.
Highly recommend turning your balcony in to a herb garden if you can… it rules. Screw yards, don’t need em
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The plant content I crave
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