Balcony Make Over Pt.1

For Horticulture this year, we remade our balcony garden. The plan was to rearrange the plants, give away old ones and get new ones (mostly flowers) and generally make the balcony look nice. This was quite the undertaking as the little "mote" that the plants sat in was full of leaves, mulch, bugs (mildew bugs, scale, and mystery crawler things), plants decided they had enough with life and died, finding pots, choosing flowers, and dealing with unexpected delays and things. It was quite the adventure! Since there is a lot to detail, I will split this into four blog posts, this one being the first.

The first step in this process was to document what plants we had, which ones we would keep, and how much space there was. This part was fairly easy. We had two peace lilies (never flowered so they are just leafy plants), two troughs of purple flowers, two pots of money plants (not sure if they're actually called that. They're just another leafy plant), a potted orchid (—>), lemon grass, oregano, "lettuce" (it did not act like actual lettuce), the flowering mini tree, another leafy plant, aloe varriant1 (big), and aloe variant2 (small). We also had extra pots, one free (but dying) trough, and a bit of dirt.

Once I finished documenting that, I dreamed up the idea for how the balcony garden could be. Basically, lots of nice flowers on the right side of the balcony where we could see them, leafy plants on the left (to make shade for the turtles), and a little plant shelf for the smaller plants in the middle. In the doorway we could hang some water plants we acquired later on and any other plant we wanted.

I don't have many pictures from back then, but here are the ones that I found:

This is the potted orchid being nice and happy.                          And this is the peace lily.

                    

This is one of the leaves of the "lettuce." It's diffidently not any lettuce we know. First, it's a vine, then it has fruit (little black balls), its leaves are a little waxy, it doesn't taste like lettuce, and IT WON'T STOP GROWING. I planted it once, and even after pulling up every shoot (and root!) I could find, it still came back! It's almost like the immortal kale we had back in Canada, except it's still going. Even now, a year later, it's alive.

This lovely flower is from our flowering tree that is nicknamed "the Magenta Flowers". Yeah, we're creative when it comes to flower names :3. I don't remember where we got it or what it's actually called, but it's been here ever since the beginning. And in all that time, it's never stopped flowering. Well, it almost never stopped, but that story is for the next post part.

Below here is the Purple Flowers, which were gifted to us by a friend who was moving. We originally got two hanging toughs of them, but one died (I think) and we tore it up. Like the Magenta Flowers, these guys never stop thinking it's summer (to be fair, it always is) and just keep chugging out flowers. 

                   

This is the Money plant, or at least what I think is a Money plant. It's quite common around here, and can get really huge. Once, down town, we walked pass the massive pot (the kind that holds small trees) that was completely over run by this plant, which in turn took of half of the entire sidewalk (the sidewalk wasn't big, but still).

These guys are nice hardy plants that don't seem to be much trouble to keep. We've managed to take cutting of these and successfully plant them in other pots, disrupted their vines, pruned them aggressively, sort of neglected them (other plants were in the ICU and got all my attention), and they're still around!

Now this one below is another hardy plant that doesn't get much attention. 

Unlike the Money plant or the peace lilies, this one we actually managed to give away. Why give away a perfectly good plant? Because we like flowers! Also, we were running out of room and already acquired more plants than we were ready for.

So yeah, we didn't keep this guy, but he was nice while he had him. The most notable thing this plant did was 'tie' its reaching root tendrils around the balcony rails and have the propensity to grow weeds. Its roots (which looked sort of like mangroves) were almost always surrounded with weeds, no mater how many times I pulled them up.

Here is the aloe varrient2. It's a different "breed" of aloe than the 'normal' kind as it's tongues are not as thick and smooth as the 'normal' aloe, and it has sharper spikes. This little guy stayed quite little, despite our expectations.

Later on in life, he did grow larger and made some offspring, but he never took over the pot like we expected. Maybe that's because he never got as much water as I suspect he needs...

THIS! This guy is the oregano and boy, does its leaves smell. You can brush up against it once and smell oregano the entire day. And it doesn't stop growing! We literally took like, one leaf and planted it in the dirt. Now it's a full blown plant that has more baby leaves than full ones. Crazy plant.

Apparently this one is popular around here, too, because I've seen it around in pots. That's probably because of its medicinal purposes (boil in water for sore throats). Those ones always are greener and bigger-leafed than ours, but MEH. We never use it anyways.

It seems like I never took a picture of the lemon grass before it got really happy, or at all, so I can't put it here. The same goes with the rest of them. Before we got to act on the plan or do anything else, our apartment complex decided to start repainting the outside of the building. So we had to move all the plants inside for a while. This did two things: 1) give a perfect opportunity to clean out the "mote" where the plants stood, and 2) reveal that my poor plants were infested with bugs.

And thus started the Great And Long War Against The Bugs...detailed in pt.2!