Garden On The Balcony, Competition "Envy, Neighbor!"

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-10 08:57

Unfortunately, our family does not yet have a land plot, but we love and appreciate the flora - the whole "green world". The plot of land is replaced by a balcony, and in the apartment itself there are a lot of flowers. So we decided to take part in the "Envy, neighbor!" Oddly enough, we did it at the insistence of our neighbors. We live in the north of the city, on Komendantsky Avenue, the apartment windows and the balcony face the northeast.

As soon as we got an apartment, and it happened almost 20 years ago, the first thing we did was buy black balcony boxes, which are still hanging with us; filled with earth from the yard. And already in the first year, and we settled in May, we had flowers growing on our balcony. The first two years the boxes were hanging outside, but the plants broke, blew out the soil and simply froze, since the main winds here are from the north-east. There was beauty, but it did not please the eye for long. When the pots were outweighed inside the balcony, both annuals and perennials began to grow better and longer. But then the residents of the house and the neighbors "rebelled": "Where is our only green balcony on the sixteen-story building?" Now we are trying to take into account all the wishes: so that we both like it and the neighbors rejoice. The pots were raised where possible, they hung additional ones on the wall,buckets with perennials were installed on the curbstone - in general, now it is almost impossible to turn around on the balcony.

Now I select the plants taking into account several factors: so that they can be clearly seen from below (we live on the eighth floor); and at the same time, so that they are not broken by the wind, so that the flowers are large and bright, and the greenery gives a lot and stretches as high as possible. Yes, and you have to run after the sun: every year the pots are shifting more and more to one corner of the balcony, where the sun is longer.

I plant annual and perennial vines, and I pick flowers for a long time and blooming profusely, preferably with bright and large flowers. From my own observations over the years, I came to the conclusion: the flowers are white and blue shades from such a height of the balcony are not visible. Of course, from year to year I plant different types of flowers. I consider this season to be very unfortunate, because after the frosts in June, the Tatar honeysuckle, although it survived, was very frail and did not want to bloom, and the vine of maiden grapes with already blossoming leaves, which survived the frosts of 2002-2003 and even this winter, then everything she died. What I did this year, readers can see in the photographs, they were taken at different times, from the end of May to August.

Flowers grow and delight us not only on the balcony. And there are a lot of ornamental plants in our apartment. Moreover, not all the plants are reflected in the photographs: some of them, due to the lack of sufficient sunlight, are periodically in "intensive care" or "rehabilitation" at neighbors with southeastern and southwestern windows, who are very happy with this. And it happens and vice versa - from their "sanatorium-resort conditions" plants for survival move to our dark northern quarter. We are grateful to the editorial board of the magazine for the fact that the "unlucky" residents of St. Petersburg can take part in the announced competition. Maybe it is worth holding some contests and competitions only for lovers of indoor plants?