Summer veggie seed sowing

It's been ages since we grew our own vegetables that reached the harvest stage! The last harvest was the monstrous Bhindi in Ahmedabad. But now that we have the sun back in our balcony, we decided it was time. 

I really wanted a proper veggie bed, not just individual pots. I had my eye on a fabric raised bed by AllThatGrows. Its light and can be assembled and dis-assembled easily. 

Fabric raised bed by AllThatGrows

For our vegetables, we wanted good-quality soil. Nothing better than IFFCO Urban Garden's soil mix!

IFFCO Urban Garden's Magic Soil

After prepping, we sowed seeds of Rocket, Basil, Lettuce and Baingan (Eggplant). We've also sowed more vegetable seeds in other pots. And we've sowed flower seeds in a shallow tray, to be transplanted later.

Our summer vegetable sowing plan

Seed sowing in tray

A few weeks later, we're starting to see small vegetable saplings!

Baingan (eggplant) saplings

More winter plants!

After the success of the winter annuals we bought in November, we were looking for more plants. We went with an open mind to buy anything that looked nice. And we picked up quite a haul!

The first one was Salvia. I've seen them growing in public places (which is generally a criteria for me to NOT buy them for our garden), but they look lovely. So we picked up two plants.

Salvia

Another interesting purchase were Stocks. Incidentally, this flower is part of a Hercule Poirot murder short story! Anyway, the flowers have a delicate smell and came in multiple colours. We picked up white and purple.

Stocks

One of my favourite flower is Carnation. We saw these pretty variety of Carnation at the nursery, which smell like cloves. 

Carnation

Our next purchase was Ranunculus. I've seen this beautiful flower in many gardening magazines and always wanted to own one. These grow from tubers and will come back again next winter. They will flower through spring. Lets wait and see what they are like!

Ranunculus

Our final purchase were African Daisy! We had them in three colours in Australia and they flowered beautifully from spring to autumn. I'm looking forward to them putting on a show here too.

African Daisy

Winter flowers and fruits

We've always had very few seasonal flowers. Our past focus was on perennials that flowered, so that we didn't have to keep putting in and digging out plants at the turn of the season. With a balcony garden, this is much easier to do. So we decided to get some winter annuals. We're hoping that they brighten up the dreary winter!

Our regular nursery doesn't stock many flowers, he's also a perennial type of person I guess! But the nursery next to his had lots of flowers. We picked up Petunia, Calendula and Chrysanthemum.

Calendula

Petunia

Chrysanthemum

We also got a Strawberry plant. In Melbourne, we were losing all of them to the Possums. Hopefully no one steals them here! 

Strawberry

While we got these plants, we also re-did our vertical garden. We planted seeds of Coriander, Methi, Spinach, Kale and Chives. Except for the Chives, all of the others have started to grow nicely.