Balcony Garden: Harvest Monday #20

Sometimes I wonder what the point is of my growing certain vegetables on the balcony. Some herbs tend to work really well for me (sage, thyme, rosemary, parsley and coriander - sort of) as I grow them, pick a bit here and there and the plant seems to last for eons.

Other things like my beans and peas were "one crop wonders". They grew, produced a small amount of fruit and then keeled over and died. It seems like a loft of effort and expense for a small handful of something.

Although my cucumbers started off so promising I only ended up getting two cucumbers off the vine. There were another two growing - but there were quite small and a funny shape and I waited for so long for them to become "big" that I missed my chance and they started to turn yellow and rot on the vine.

It's quite amazing that no matter how large the cucumbers grew the vine could support their weight. I'd expect them to drop off the vine due to their weight.

I probably needed to be hand-pollinating these guys too, but the flowers were SO small I just couldn't be bothered.

I think at the end of the day the cucumbers just could not handle the crazy crazy weather we've had of late. Super hot days followed by days of rain and cold conditions. Heck, I could barely cope with it.

It's very exciting to see the tendrils grasp on to the make shift cucumber trellis we'd rigged up for these guys.

As was the case with the bean and peas, the cucumbers started to slowly die from the bottom up, until all I was left with was a crunchy brown twig with nothing on it bar two rotting cucumbers. Fail.

But I did get two cucumbers...and I did have some minor success with my tomatoes after a few false starts. Cucumbers + tomatoes + some other stuff = GREEK SALAD!

 

 

Of course The Boy cannot live on Greek Salad alone so we threw a couple of steaks into the pan after rubbing them with this AWESOME bold beef rub that our mate Tim from Smokey O's makes.  We were given this bottle to sample and sample we did....it's good stuff. Tim sells his rubs and BBQ sauces and if you want to get your hands on some I'd suggest dropping him a line - smokeyosbbq@gmail.com.  Follow him on twitter as well as he often does a pop-up BBQ event that is WELL worth taking part in (check our Ramen's mouth-watering post here).

You can view more Harvest Monday posts on Daphne's Dandelions blog.