Balcony on Michael’s Domain

Paprika harvest is starting soon

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time, we will have a decent paprika harvest from our balcony garden. We have had success with cucumbers and tomatoes , but our paprika plants were always attacked early on in the growing season by some spider mites, which seem to be indigenous to our balcony. However, the fruits are just now starting to get their red color. Hopefully, all will get red before the first night temperatures fall below zero on our balcony, but that is often only the case in late December, since the balcony is glassed. Of course, green paprika is also edible, but the red ones just contain more vitamins (at least more vitamin C and folic acid/vitamin B9 . Do you want to know which breed we seeded? We used the seeds from the red Ramiro paprika that you can buy from Prisma: https://www.s-kaupat.fi/tuote/coop-makea-suippopaprika-300g/6438574276493 .

50 cucumbers and counting

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Pandemic + staycation = balcony gardening. While our tomatoes are all still green, the cucumber harvest has started about 2 weeks ago. So far, we have harvested 50 cucumbers, 25 of them today. There is at least the same amount still hanging on the plants. Last year, the cucumbers got infested early in the season with spider mites and we harvested only very few. The only thing I did differently from last year is that I included fertilizer with every watering. I tried two different biological fertilizers, but they did not fly for two reasons: the nettle-based (fermented) fertilizer was so stinky that we could not use the balcony for three days after I had applied it. The second fertilizer I tried was worm tea, a byproduct of our worm farm . It is essentially odor-neutral, but our worm farm is too small to produce enough fertilizer for the cucumbers and tomatoes, which both have high nutrient demands. So I used essentially only the Biolan liquid fertilizer and I am happy with it. It contains apart from the usual NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) also a lot of microminerals.

Growing tomatoes on a balcony in Finland

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We live in Helsinki , Finland. Helsinki is something like 60° North and the climate is anything but favorable for anything except mushrooms, blueberries and reindeer lichen . But our apartment has a glassed balcony facing South and so I thought it should be possible to grow some veggies there. I seeded tomatoes inside in mid-April, which is a time when the temperatures can easily fall below 0°C and also snow storms are not unheard of during this time of the year.Not enough lightThat was too early as there was still not enough light and rank growth was the consequence: very thin, fragile and tall plants trying to reach more light. I don’t think it is very ecological to use artificial light, but it would have helped in this case. The other mistake was that the pots we used were much too small. We used 2 and 5 liter pots, harboring each 2 plants. Next time we’ll only use one plant per 10 liter pot. However, when the temperatures went up in the middle of May, we transferred the tomato plants to the balcony. Because now there was plenty of light they grew very fast and soon there were lots of yellow flowers.Pollination troublesHowever, there were no tomatoes. It appears that tomatoes need either insects or wind for pollination, none of which we had on our glassed balcony. To replace the wind one can shake the plants to release the pollen. Once we did that and opened the glass windows they promptly developed fruits. The tomato species was of the indeterminate type - meaning that it kept constantly growing and producing flowers. We had to support them with strings attached to the balcony ceiling. The one thing that was most laborious was the watering and fertilization. Since the plants had very little soil, they needed to be watered daily and fertilized twice a week with a dilute fertilizer. In addition we had to put the balcony blinds into use during the sunny hours of the summer days to prevent the plants from frying. Lots of work for a few tomatoes. I agree with Wise Bread that growing your own fruits and veggies is more of a hobby than a way to save money.Superior tasteAdmittedly, the tomatoes from our balcony taste better then those from the grocery store; my four year old son said today he only eats self-grown tomatoes. Especially in the Northern part of Western Europe, many people have never tasted really good tomatoes. The deprecatory name for a tomato that has no taste whatsoever is (in German language) “ Hollandtomate ”. I guess the lack of taste is due to the optimal conditions they are grown in, maybe also the specific strain. E.g. in order to develop full flavor, tomatoes need also dry periods. Dry periods, however, result in smaller fruits. And because commercial producers are paid by the kilogram their tomatoes never see any dry periods. Taste is much more difficult to measure than weight. The lack of flavor is probably not due to artificial fertilizer (as I suspected before). We used artificial fertilizer and the result was still superior to everything commercial I have tasted this year.YieldI harvested alltogether more than 70 tomatoes (about 7 kg) from the plants. The harvest started quite late (in the beginning of August) and lasted until mid-October, when I picked all tomatoes including the green ones to prevent them from freezing. All green tomatoes finally ripened inside and a few managed to rotten. The last own tomatoes we ate in the end of November. Even those that ripened after picking had a much better taste than the stuff from our supermarket.