Spring

There's a twist on the old adage about spring in the Cooper household. Here, April showers bring July tomatoes. Last year, we were really torn between tolerating our landlord and having to tear up our prolific produce patch. We were able to harvest a few weeks worth of greens and tomatoes before we left.

With a much limited space for gardening this year, we knew that getting a substantial crop would be somewhat of a challenge. In order to lay out the design for the hanging garden, we first had to map out the sun on each part of the balcony. The good thing was it only took about 5 minutes to determine how much sun we would be getting on the balcony. The bad thing. We get NO sun. Apparently, our apartment is directly north facing and according to some principles of physics or whatever science describes the rules of the suns rotation, the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, and shines the whole time from the south.

Nevertheless, we've decided to forge forth and go ahead with our full shade garden. For whatever reason, I couldn't find much guidance on growing in full, dense shade on the Internet so i figured that this project would be blog worthy in order to document our growing efforts.

We're focusing on the "roots and shoots" veggies this summer since popular opinion is that those are the only edibles that have a chance of producing with little sun. Some friends of ours were kind enough to give us some space in their backyard for us to grow tomatoes, peppers, and a few other sun loving crops.


This is what our balcony looks like for most of the day. I've seen a number of "full shade garden" sites that show gardens in places that are actually quite sunny. The shadow on the balcony extends about 5 feet over onto the lawn.

Having read up on growing in shade, I am hopeful that the garages that face us will give us just the brightness boost we need in order to get things going with the plants.

 

 

The kiddos are great too BTW. Abdullah has made himself right at home on the balcony creating all sorts of activities with the planters, rocks, tools, and dirt. KC has gotten her walking together just in time to join him in outdoor schenanigins.