Apartment Gardening: Meet Bob and Sheila

Spring has sprung and we're getting close to summer, which means its time for my annual ritual of planting, and subsequently accidentally killing, a bunch of herbs. This year I'm optimistic and hoping to really be on top of this whole thing. So, in addition to the herbs (which hopefully I selected more wisely this year, with the advantage of now knowing that my balcony is blazingly hot and only the hardiest of plants will survive), I decided I would plant some veggies in pots, which is apparently called "container gardening".

For this project, I picked two things: Roma tomatoes, and Banana peppers, both of which I think will be able to survive in (and maybe, actually appreciate) the intense sun on my balcony.

Here is the tomato plant, aka Bob. I'm optimistic about Bob, because I've learned that Roma tomatoes are a determinate type of tomato (as opposed ot the indeterminate type), which means that Bob will form flowers at the tips of his branches, instead of growing indefinitely and eventually taking over my entire lovely yet small balcony. I still have to get him a metal supportive tomato cage, but he doesn't need it quite yet. Roma tomatoes have the advantage of being one of the few types I can actually stand, because they have a low ratio of tomato-guts to flesh. Good luck, Bob!

And now meet the pepper plant, aka Sheila. I wasn't sure about this, but I picked Banana peppers because they seem relatively skinny and hopefully less difficult to grow to a useable normal size than a bell pepper might be... but, we'll see! Good luck, Sheila!

Now, obviously they are young, but you can see they both have some fruit-bearing potential...


Fingers crossed!!!