My balcony vegetable garden is starting to flower and I have been able to enjoy a few beans. A wrote about setting up my balcony to growing some food earlier. I am using several containers and all but one of the “crops” has done well. The sweet peas hardly sprouted and the few that did then died.

The first tomato.

The Tomato plants have done very well, as you might expect – they seem to grow with no problems. How much food I get only time will tell though, a few tomatoes are started to show up. Mainly I planted cherry tomatoes (I figure with my small planters that would work best). But the first batch of seeds didn’t do so well, so I planted some seeds from the tomatoes I got at the store (full size) – some sprouted, so we will see how they do.

Green bean flower

The beans are the first to have produced and I have enjoyed a few beans so far. They seem to be producing pretty well. I really do like being able to just pick a snack off my plants.

I needed to improvise something to give the beans and tomato plants some stability. I couldn’t find something designed for it at the store (I did find a couple smaller items to support tomato plants a bit later – so I have a couple of those in use).

Flowers on a pepper plant

The pepper plants did not have a high percentage that sprouted but those that did seem to be growing fairly well. They are growing quite tall and are fairly lanky looking. The flowers started to show up maybe 10 days ago and the starts of many very small peppers are now visible.

We gets lots of rain, but the plants are largely sheltered from it (the rain has to be blown by a fairly hard wind to water those on the balcony – which happens sometimes but not very often to any substantial degree). So I have been watering them. The do get quite a bit of sun.

Related: Growing Lettuce in My Backyard – Grow some of your own food – Science Sort of Explains: Hiccups – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Tomato flowers