This is the saga of my super amazing wife and I trying to garden on our balcony. As you’ll recall from my Peace Corps days, I used to have a rather large garden around my house where I would spend my days growing crops and the like. I even harvested some pretty good stuff towards the end there and made a meal out of it, which is very neat. In New Haven all I really managed to grow was a small mango tree for the porch which I eventually and tragically killed by leaving it outside during some freezing rain. My super amazing wife grew up on a farm and likes to be surrounded by plants and animals so when we moved to our apartment together in Alexandria we got one with a balcony instead of a sun room specifically so we could spend time out there and also try to grow some plants. I first tried to convince her we could raise cows and/or sheep out there, and despite her deep love of sheep we didn’t do either which is sad but there you go.

Anyways the garden. We tried growing things both summers we were there (past tense because as I am writing this we have moved out of Alexandria and to an undisclosed country far far away) though summer 1 didn’t go so well. It started off pretty alright but then we disappeared for a week and everything died and we didn’t really manage to get it going again. But summer 2 went a lot better! Our setup was just six or so window garden troughs set up on a metal rack so we could keep it neat and everything outside.

My super amazing wife and I had different philosophies when it came to what we decided to grow in our individual garden beds. I pay no heed to practicality and only try to grow what interests me, which is mostly what I fondly remember growing in Zambia, such as carrots and orange sweet potatoes and beans. I also like to try to grow fruit trees, in memory of my little mango tree that again I tragically killed because I was a neglectful plant parent. None of these things however grow particularly well in tiny little containers on a balcony. My super amazing wife on the other hand is really thoughtful about what would grow well in such conditions and what she would actually use in the kitchen and also what would be pretty, so she instead favors herbs and wildflowers. She thought I was very silly when I tried to grow carrots in a balcony container.

And for a while I thought she was very silly for doubting me because the carrots seemed to grow gangbusters and were looking really good from the top but then when I finally harvested they were tiny and she was right of course (you can see the results in the first pic in this post). But what did a lot better were the soybeans I planted for edamame. Those plants grew pretty big and I got about as big a harvest as you could possibly expect from one tiny little balcony pot, and we subsequently enjoyed some home-grown edamame which was fun:

Some of our balcony garden lives on. In addition to the balcony garden, my super amazing wife had a whole bunch of houseplants that she wanted to stay alive while we were living in this undisclosed country. I had to bring my DeLorean down to my parents’ house anyways, so my mom very kindly offered to babysit all the plants for a few years. I was initially going to take the AutoTrain down to Florida and was very much looking forward to that, but turns out you can’t take a DeLorean on the AutoTrain. They don’t accept gullwing doors because the people who park the car on the train wouldn’t be able to get out of the car (so they say). So I wound up driving all the plants down to Florida myself, which was really a fine experience overall (and I finally got to test out my cupholder on a long car drive), but still, it wasn’t relaxing on a train for 16 hours overnight.

My mom has reported that so far the plants we brought her are absolutely thriving. I shouldn’t be too surprised, the difference between me and my mom is that my mom actually looks up what is good for the plants and then behaves accordingly. My little lemon tree was suffering I think because I was overwatering it. I had left for a week and my super amazing wife didn’t water it much and it suddenly grew two new branches, and now in Florida for like a month it is already twice as big despite me trying to grow it for the better part of two years. But having a balcony garden was a hoot and now in undisclosed country we have significantly more space (though still not Zambia space) and I am excited to see what we manage to grow out there!