What I’m growing on the balcony veggie garden this year

Gardening is such a fun never ending learning experience and now with a year’s worth of balcony veggie gardening experience under my belt I am looking forward to this new growing season!

I’m right away going to jump into what I’m growing this year in my balcony veggie garden. Please scroll down if you’d like to see what I grew last year and how I fared growing those veggies!

Most of these have already grown into fairly big plants, some are already blooming or growing fruits. And they are, as we speak, outside on the balcony hardening off. This week is our final frost date here in Belgium, so I’ll be transplanting most of them into their final containers and leaving them outside permanently. And I’m so happy about this!! The spring has been very cold and my balcony has looked quite desolate for a long time but it’s finally starting to look abundantly green again with all the plants outside!

And I may still add more, probably some radishes and bok choy cause I have the seeds and anything else that catches my fancy. I did try to sow some mini cucumber seeds as well but so far none have germinated. I hope I can manage to grow them, would be a good alternative for the zucchini.

Last year’s balcony veggie garden successes

Last year was the very first year I ever tried growing vegetables myself. There are certain things that grew amazingly well last year, others that just did fine and some that just didn’t do well at all. So I’ll be taking all of this in account while choosing what to grow and I’m really excited to try some new vegetables as well!

As I explain here in my balcony introduction post it definitely has its limitations. I only have a small area with sunlight and most of it doesn’t even get 4 or 5 hrs of sunlight each day. But it has it’s own little micro climate and I’ve noticed that some full sun plants actually still do pretty well!

My biggest successes in my balcony veggie garden last year were without a doubt my tomatoes, my beans and the flat leaf kales like the Cavolo Nero, Dazzling Blue and Flanders Borecole. The Swiss chard did very well and I think the beets (mixed and Chioggia) were a success too. The pink Chinese celery did great too though I started it a bit late and in the end it did not survive the ‘big freeze’ during the winter.

I found it interesting to see that tomatoes that are supposed to be in full sun did so well, though it is possible that in full sun they would be even more productive! Kale and Swiss chard generally don’t need to be in full sun. I think they could probably grow bigger and yield a bigger harvest if they are grown in bigger containers or in full soil but nevertheless they did well in relatively small containers on my balcony. The kales even survived the winter and are at this moment still blooming and producing a large amount of seeds.

Last year’s disappointments

There were some small and big disappointments last year.

I absolutely loved growing Zucchini. It’s such a gorgeous plant with it’s big foliage and big yellow flowers and I love eating zucchini. But I only ended up harvesting 2 zucchinis from my plant, after that it succumbed to powdery mildew. A second zucchini plant didn’t even get to produce any fruit before it succumbed to powdery mildew as well.
I think it’s pretty common that Zucchini plants suffer from powdery mildew at the end of their growing cycle but trying to grow it on a balcony where there is hardly any air circulation is probably not ideal if you want to avoid powdery mildew. So for this year I’ve decided to skip the zucchini.

Another disappointment were the radishes. I ended up with radish greens and no radishes!! I think I grew them too close together and maybe they didn’t get enough sun, I’m not sure. They also suffered a bit from aphids. I did end up making a lovely radish green pesto so it was not a waste energy but it would have been nice to have some radishes too. I may try radishes again this year, giving them more space and trying to put them in a sunnier spot, I’m not sure. Since I have the seeds, there’s no reason I shouldn’t try again!

A similar story with my Parisian carrots, I did get some carrots but they were teeny tiny! I think they simply need more sun than I can give them on the balcony.

And my mixed lettuce was not a huge success either. I followed the instructions of the package to just randomly throw a bunch of seeds to grow the lettuce but they were way too crowded and I guess I didn’t thin them out enough. It’s so hard killing your baby seedlings when their still small even when it’s supposed to be good! I managed to harvest some lettuce but I think they were not as productive as they could have been. And they really suffered from aphids too. I had more luck with the Red Mizuna leaves, though they also suffered a bit from aphids and were a bit too crowded too. This year I’ll be planting my lettuce seeds in modules before I transplant the seedlings into their final containers. This way I can choose the healthiest seedlings and give them more space.

Another total failure was the Orach. Orach is similar to spinach, but it can handle warmer temperatures better so it seemed great to grow during the summer. But only a few seeds germinated and the young seedlings got eaten most likely by a mouse on my balcony!! What a pity! I tried growing them again this spring but not a single seed germinated! Might try again though!

And almost the same thing with my red Bok Choy, the seedlings got attacked by thrips and the leaves started to misform and just died! I may grow them again though.

Looking back it seems like I had a lot of failures, maybe even more than I had successes but honestly they didn’t really matter… It’s the successes that you celebrate and the failures are just part of the course and you learn from them.

So what are you guys growing this year? Let me know in the comments!!

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13 May 2021 by INE BEERTEN

balcony gardeningcontainer gardeningurban gardeningvegetables