General Gardening
Saving and Storing Seeds
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f a container plant does well in your garden, save the seeds each year, and the plants you grow will begin to adapt to your local conditions. You can even end up creating your own heirloom varieties that you can share with others. Saving seeds will allow you will have healthier plants each year that grow better and better – and it’s cheaper than buying new seeds or seedlings each year!
Participating in a Plant Swap
Often a container plant will explode with growth, produce a lot of seeds or grow too big for the balcony garden. Balcony gardeners don’t have much space to work with, so a lot of pruning must be done, many seeds can go unused and large plants need to be given away, sold or thrown away. But there is another solution to these problems: a plant swap.
The Harvest Club of Orange County
A volunteer organization in Orange County, Calif., called The Harvest Club, has combined urban gardening, sustainable food production and volunteerism in a fascinating way. Jeff Lebow founded The Harvest Club in 2009 in Huntington Beach, and now the club has more than 450 harvest volunteers and more than 200 registered backyard growers throughout Orange County to harvest fruit and other produce from residents’ backyards that would otherwise go to waste.
Vegetables from the Container Garden
Several good films to get you excited about vegetable gardening are two documentaries about food. One is Supersize Me, and the other is Food, Inc. Supersize Me is the famous 2004 documentary that follows director Morgan Spurlock on a 30-day MacDonald’s-only diet. He had gained 24.5 pounds and some unexpected physical and emotional effects from the 30-day junk food binge. Food, Inc. is a 2008 documentary about the way our food is produced and marketed. Vegetable gardening in a balcony kitchen garden is one way to know where your food comes from and how it was grown. It is also a more healthy and delicious alternative to eating prepackaged foods.
Propagating Ferns Using Spores
Spores grow on the bottom of fern fronds. They grow inside structures called sori and are clearly visible as little yellow, green, brown or black clumps on the undersides of the fronds. Once the spores are ready, they are released and blow away in the wind. You can use collect spores from a fern frond and grow young ferns in sealed containers.
