Not quite the walled garden

On the lighter side...

I'm trying to grow stuff.  This is probably a bad idea, but whatever.

See, my apartment has a balcony that faces south and I'm on the top floor of a 3-story building.  Since I'm in the northern hemisphere, this means it gets a lot of sunlight - so much so that it actually heats up my living room a fair bit, even with the overhang.  Which is also there, so that while in the winter I get a lot of sun, in the summer, I get sun in the morning and the evening but not at high noon (because the overhang shields most of the patio).

This, combined with the moderate weather of southern California, makes the balcony pretty much the ideal place to grow stuff.  At least in theory.

The first step was to get a covering for the balcony floor, since it's just concrete and that's both ugly and hot.  This was done with fake green grass - cheap stuff, but it works pretty well.  Once I did that, I thought, "hrm, it'd be nice to have some planters or such..."; the rest, as they say, is history.

At this point, I have four 24" planters, 5 10" pots, 1 12" pot, and a couple of 12"x3 level "strawberry pots".  Yeah, never give an OCD person a new toy to play with.

In actual plants, I have 4 scotch bonnet peppers and a rosemary bush.  The SBs are doing awesome, as far as I can tell: there's new growth and such.  The rosemary is looking a little unhappy, but that may be me over-watering it, so I'm going to change some stuff when I get home.  The rest of the pots and planters and such were planted with seeds: cayenne and thai chili peppers, some mini bell peppers, some garlic that does really well in the area, and a broad assortment of herbs.  I'm also trying to get some tomato seedlings to start in the second bedroom-cum-greenhouse (it's the hottest room anyway, so it works).

So far, none of the seeds have sprouted, but that's pretty typical for most of them.  The exception is the basil - that should have started showing by now (it's been about 4-5 days).  I'll give it until the weekend, probably, and then maybe try starting some seedlings indoors first (depending on how the tomatoes do, though I may have screwed those up by letting them dry out).  I've got extra seeds for everything but the SBs (which are fine) and the rosemary, so I can start over entirely if needed.

However, since I know me, I also got self-watering pots and planters and, for the ones that aren't, an automated watering system (which is what I have to adjust for the rosemary; I need to move the spout and probably reduce the frequency).  ADHD gardening at its finest.

We'll see how this all works out.  Assuming I get some signs of greenery here in the next week, I'll take snaps and post 'em.