Krys Klassen is an enthusiastic amateur balcony gardener with twenty years on a southwest facing seventh floor balcony.

The lazy balcony gardener (me) really likes to grow greens and herbs. Being able to step outside and harvest parts of a meal, critical ingredients or last minute embellishments, is a great convenience. With a little thoughtful planning, those elements can also provide decorative touches.

Salad and garnish greens have two outdoor seasons, spring and fall. Summer is too hot, and the leaves turn bitter and bolt (develop seeds and get really, really inedible) almost overnight. Spring starts as soon as the daytime temperatures get above zero.

Gardeners on the ground (GOTGs) have to wait till they can work the soil, but balcony gardeners (BGs) have two advantages. First they usually are one to three zones ahead of the GOTGs (heat rises and cold settles in low-lying areas). So they can cheat and buy, or thaw, soil to fill pots and seed them with various exotic greens and push the season as early as March, or earlier with a little thought, sun exposure and cold-frame-like arrangements (glass-covered protection from old windows, etc.).

You can seed new pots every week or two until the end of May to have continuous green salad and garnish material till the end of June, or even July if you have cool shady places available. Start again at the end of August for a supply of greens until it gets really frosty, sometimes as late as Christmas.

I seed rather casually by sprinkling the seeds fairly generously and covering them with a thin layer of soil tamped down. You can cover the pot with clear plastic for a few days to keep them from drying too quickly and/or water frequently with a very fine spray. I begin harvesting the biggest plants when they get an inch or two high by pulling them out, root and all, instead of thinning. I’ve had good success with: arugula, leaf lettuce, mustard, and Italian greens of most sorts. Spinach works, too.

For the not-so-lazy gardener (you?) Swiss chard (beta vulgaris), frost tolerant greens and/or pansies seedlings can easily be potted as soon as March. You may have to wait a little longer for the produce of Swiss chard and cabbage, bibb or butterhead lettuce, romaine or cos, and crisp head or iceberg lettuces, but they can also provide attractive borders and leafy material planted among flowers. If it gets really frosty you might want to cover the plants for safety. I have rarely had any frost on my mid-town south-west facing balcony after March.

My pansies usually get aphids badly in the summer and since I avoid spraying, especially what I plan to eat, I tend to throw them out and plant new ones in the fall, since their frost tolerance will let them bloom till Christmas if you have enough sun. The flowers are delicious in salads, as are nasturtiums but those are better planted from seed as frost doesn’t suit them at all.

 

winter balcony

Krys Klassen is an enthusiastic amateur balcony gardener with twenty years on a southwest facing seventh floor balcony.

Well, isn’t this an unusual season? My annuals, with the exception of the pansies, survived until Christmas Eve. I saw evidence of similar anomalies at ground level. The winter 2001/02 is going to be a source of gardening fish stories for some time. And at this rate pansies are going to be considered perennial and year-round. They looked a bit taken aback after the coldest night so far (-7 degrees Celsius) but revived as soon as the temperatures rose.

I sense a general unease among gardeners everywhere as they anxiously anticipate a severe cold snap that will kill off all those deluded plants that think spring must be imminent. The luxurious snow cover last year was such a relief from this worry. You find yourself beginning to hope against all logic and experience, that this is really the worst that winter is going to be this year. There are the examples from the last century (don’t you love saying that?) such as the winter of 1984/85 when crocus bloomed on south-facing slopes near High Park in Toronto in February. It seems like a gardener’s weather diary for the past decade would provide a wonderful source of wildly bizarre anecdotes. My current experience is unlike that of my sister who kept diaries in the sixties when last year’s frost dates could accurately predict next year’s.

When are They going to revise the zone rating system for plants to reflect the ranges 5 to 7 that accurately describe Toronto weather?

So Canadian - half an article on the weather. You have to admit the weather is going out of its way to provide material!

I have a new standard to meet here on my seventh floor balcony. I received a clematis challenge. Not personally, but in the Toronto Star last year, a balcony gardener claimed to have five clematis on her rooftop oasis. I have managed only two at a time so far - an early blue bell-shaped one and ‘Golden Tiara’, a yellow bell-shape with a dark purple, almost black, centre. I can claim only two successes, unless I get credit for ‘Bluebird’ which was given up for adoption when the building balconies were refurbished and for ‘Montana’, which I am sure will revive next year. After all, a friend at Merlin’s Hollow said he’s had clematis come back after seven years of feigning death. By that measure ’Montana’ has six years left before last rites. I am sure it’s only sleeping, like the fairy tale princess and unlike the Monty Python parrot. There were also my first two attempts, ‘Jackmani’ and the ‘Duchess of Edinburgh’, before I knew clematis could come back after several years’ hiatus, and before the Year-of-No-Balcony-and-Great-Anguish-and-Despair.

The clematis challenge is hereditary. My mother strove for years in the seventies to get clematis to grow on the ground. I never knew she had succeeded until I sorted through her photos. I found evidence of a truly stunning plant smothered in large white blooms growing in her backyard.

The second clematis balcony challenge is: how much do you plan for the up-close and personal perspective and how much for the neighbours on the ground below? All my clematis have tiny bell-like flowers, which are quite impressive (when you’ve fertilized heavily and there is lots of bloom) at a distance of a few feet. That is about as far away as you can get on my balcony without plummeting to the pavement below. The smaller flowers are more wind resistant. The seed heads look very satisfactory from up here for a few months until the wind blows them all to bits. However, from the ground, you can’t really see much except a mass of green tendrils. Obviously, the folks in my apartment are the priority, but it is very rewarding to provide passersby with a vision of burgeoning growth on an otherwise somewhat sterile building. I have succeeded with German ivy and nasturtiums that cascade from the window boxes. As well, several small trees are beginning to make their mark, but the clematis flowers are my secret.

The people in my building are amazed by all this lush green growth and they wonder why I don’t move to a house so I may give my hobby free reign. They have no idea how much a house seriously interferes with the time and money available for gardening. I am creating some ground-level hazards for them with my irrigation run-off and leaf and flower detritus. Luckily I am not alone in this, and some neighbours actually like it -because it discourages trespassers taking short-cuts through our parking lot.

So my resolution for 2002: get more clematis!

 

summer balcony

Krys Klassen is an enthusiastic amateur balcony gardener with twenty years on a southwest facing seventh floor balcony.

I was inspired to pass further comment on a friend’s reflection of ‘the summer that never was’, at least at his cottage on Lake Huron with drought hardy annuals. Things were a little different on a seventh floor balcony looking west over Forest Hill.

Thanks to the consistently cool temperatures and ample rain, I was spared twice a day watering, the pansies lasted more beautifully than ever from March until the annual aphid infestation (delayed till August), and for the first time ever, the springtime potted primula transplanted outside did not shrivel and wither in the heat and life-sucking wind, but grew luxuriantly leafy and green and bloomed until late July!

The September bonus of hurricane induced heat and humidity provided a wonderful second lease on life for traditional annuals like geraniums, and lysianthus, if you hadn’t already given up and thrown them out. And that strange tiny-flowered annual I was talked into at Loblaws, whose performance I was initially unimpressed by, it burst forth in gloriously heavily laden shooting stars of delicate pink late in September.

Last winter was another story. The death toll was high: two volunteer Manitoba maples headed for careers as bonsai, my prized Golden Tiara clematis in its fourth year and the General Sikorski clematis (bought to propitiate my husband, an aeronautics buff and fan of the Sikorsky helicopter, but otherwise a colour-blind horticulture-phobe).

However, all the alpine clematis survived (are you surprised? I think not) and the two replacement clematis, Etoile Violette and a native variety, are doing very well.

It was a bad summer for diseases and my feeble organic remedy attempts. The columbine, that has valiantly survived nearly a decade, fell victim to leaf miner and mildew. The aphids came for the pansies as always, but a little later than usual. The rosemary and the rudbeckia (I confess, purchased, already potted, in early August to fill the late summer floral gap) turned into artemesia from mildew, not all that unpleasant actually, except for the flowers…

There were other success stories. The true artemesias (not mildew-induced), silver brocade and silver mound, were as happy as ever; in fact, the pleasant September weather has encouraged the silver mound to excel beyond any previous year, or maybe it was the extra elbow room provided by the demise of the Golden Tiara. (Sigh.) Perilla flourished, its deep mahogany foliage setting off perfectly the artemesias (true, and mildewed rudbeckia) and lysianthus. Its location was determined by my removing it from every container I didn’t want it in, since it liberally seeds itself all winter. It’s worth the effort for its changing display from tiny purple plants like ground cover in spring, through the full gap-filling, contrasting deep rich red-browns of summer, followed by the inconsiderable purple flowering, to the three to four foot tall winter interest stalks with seed heads like the top of a baroque steeple.

The volunteer native(?) grass has also taken hold this year and filled some corners quite nicely. Not as pretty as the more ornamental nursery varieties right now, but I have high hopes for warm straw colour for my winter landscape.

The quest for trailing components took a dive a few years ago when the German ivies kept succumbing to the aphid invasion, but I think I have two new candidates. Lamium, possibly silver beacon, has a lovely vigorous trailing habit and its silver outlined leaves show up beautifully at night, in the distance and against dark containers or foliage. Another late summer fill-in, chocolate orange mint, has the unexpected (by me) bonus of deep purple trailing stems. Keeping it alive for next year will be my winter project.

 

balcony flowers

Krys Klassen is an enthusiastic amateur balcony gardener with twenty years on a southwest facing seventh floor balcony.

We talk about scented gardens, and edible gardens, and texture in gardens but who mentions sound in the garden? I’m not talking Japanese temple bells or wind chimes or piped in music or even trickling water, but the woodwinds in rustling grasses, the xylophone in fluttering leaves and the tambourine of seed heads. On a wind blasted balcony over a siren-soaked street, the sounds of the horticultural orchestra are an incalculable, but frequently unexplored, pleasure.

Oh, you can add a few bird songs and the pleasant drone of benign insects if you must, but the sound effects of the seemingly inarticulate leaves, stems and seedpods are quite enough to be going on with.

I first noticed this rich panoply of sound at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hamilton where, on a hot August afternoon, the breeze in a six-foot stand of a grass nearly made me swoon with pleasure.

You’ll notice my language is getting florid. That is one of the inherent benefits, or dangers, of exploring the sensual side of gardening.

Why is sound in the garden neglected? We are a visual society. Visual effects are stunning and captured easily and often in photographs. But they are, at least partly, a cool and slightly removed experience. The other senses are somewhat harder to satisfy at a distance. Potpourri is a credible attempt at capturing the scent of the garden, and summer meals, with fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flower components, give us its tastes and a few textures a step or two away from the garden site. The feel of dewy roses on your face, and the sound (that I’ve only read about) of their long thorns clicking in the breeze, are seldom, if ever, recorded and transported, except in memory.

That six-foot grass was never likely to make it onto my seventh floor balcony but, if it had, I hoped it would have drowned out the constant swish of traffic that I try to mentally transform into the sound of waves. I can still recall the rushing sound of the wind in that grass, as of a waterfall or mountain stream.

The sound of exploding pea shrub pods bouncing seeds (or peas) off the neighbour’s air conditioner is musical in a minor key and tickles my funny bone. Evening primroses make an actual pop when they open in the evening. (Again, I’ve only read about it.)

In the breeze at sunset, the fluttering leaves of the native clematis trellised against the wall are like soft wings or the lyrical whisper of a flute.

Even wintry blasts are moderated by the cheery castanets of perilla seed pods, bringing a southern intimation to the bleak Canadian winter scene.

I’ll close with a credit to the wind in this celebration of sound in the garden:

“What mighty battles I have seen and heard waged between the trees and the west wind – an Iliad fought in the fields of the air” Edith M. Thomas