See my garden grow

How fresh can you get!

I picked the first lettuce from my balcony garden. It's a Batavia lettuce. I made a green salad to go with my chicken dinner, first off. I put the rest all washed and spin dried from my salad spinner into a ziplock to keep in the fridge. It's going to make quite a few wonderful salads.

I grew it without any chemicals, only guano fertiliser. Is that organic? Next year, now that the compost is going strong, I'll be able to add compost at planting time and not have to lug planting composition home from the gardening store. In case anybody is wondering, my compost is a mix of peat moss, vermiculite, kitchen scraps of fruits and vegetables and some guano too. I made this mix on conclusions made reading on squarefoot gardening websites.

Wow, there's such a variety of plants on the balcony already: rosemary and sage, radishes and lettuce, heather, juniper, baby fir tree, a gardenia and a crysanthemum. I'd like to get a couple climbers or hanging plants too.

My balcony faces west and gets partial sun during the afternoons. I planted and sowed seeds in September, October and November. Fall is a good time of year to start plants here. The weather is in the 70ºs during the day and cools to the 50's at night.

Naturally, I'll have to wait until next summer to see if they can take the heat and humidity of the Southern Spanish coast.