Wheat Mold

I grew some wheat grass a long time ago and had lots of wheat berries left over. They last forever in the fridge so when spring came around, I planted a handful in this bucket to see how well they would grow and add a bit of green to the balcony.

When growing wheat grass for juicing, you only want it to grow about 6 inches tall before harvesting. But in this case, I'm going to let it grow until it dies off or something kills it. I'm not expecting to be harvesting wheat, I just want to see how tall it can grow. And it seems to be doing ok but I'm noticing spots of mold on the leaves and stems. A good rain every now and then should wash it away temporarily but not much rain hits my balcony and I can't hose it down. If the mold takes over completely I'm going to have to end this experiment prematurely.

Poor Tomatoes

I transplanted these a few weeks ago and they don't appear to be growing very fast: brandywine on the left, black cherry on the right. I expected them to be twice this height by now. The weather has been unusually cool here for the past couple of weeks so I'm going to blame the lack of warm weather. Otherwise they seem to be doing fine. Some of the lower leaves are damaged from rubbing up against the lids of the tote but that's ok.

I want to plant some pole beans and melons. Might be getting a little late to be starting melons from seed up here but at least I don't have to worry about frost. I've got to start some basil inside as well. I always start basil too early so this time I'm going to start it late.

An early harvest

Before going away for a couple of weeks, my wife decided it was time to harvest all of the salad greens growing in this container. She's not particularly fond of arugula and I guess she wasn't crazy about the mizuna either which was probably a good thing because we had more than enough baby lettuce leaves for six people.

After a couple of weeks the lettuce in this container is growing again. I wasn't around to water it but I guess we got a bit of rain while we were away and the weather wasn't overly hot. The mizuna seemed to survive our absence as well and the arugula was starting to flower.