With our small-space garden so close to the kitchen, we’d grab a few cherry tomatoes or a cucumber for salad, or pick a few peppers to mix in with some tomato sauce. These regular, small harvests mean we don’t often have massive pile of produce to photograph.
We did collect one basket of vegetables (above) to thank our neighbor, who watered our planters while we were out of town.
The 2019 vegetable season was a success. Here’s a rundown of which veggies worked well in our balcony, self-watering planter box garden this year. (The 2019 plant list is found here.)
- Oregon Sugar Pod Pea: Excellent vigorous bushy growth with lots of sweet, delicious peas.
- Teton Spinach: Good flavor, but plant growth was slow.
- Sugar Crunch Cucumber: Many smaller-size cucumbers.
- Costa Rican, Slovana, Mama Mia Giallo, Thunderbolt, Good as Good Peppers: All the peppers did great, producing into late October, though they did get aphids later in the season, which slowed them a bit. The top performer in terms of quantity was Slovana (the light green-yellow pepper in the pictures) which produced appx. 50 small peppers. Earthbox says you can plant 6 peppers per box, and we only planted 5. Though honestly, our 5 seemed crowded – next year we’d plant fewer per box.
- Sun Gold, Sweetheart of the Patio Tomato: Sun Gold was the best performer overall this year. It grew up maybe 8 ft high in the Earthbox, to the “ceiling” of our balcony and produced hundreds of sweet orange tomatoes, all the way through the end of October. Sweetheart of the Patio did well in a City Picker planter and the fruits were tasty, but the plant was small (determinate) and the harvest season was relatively short.
- Delizzimo Strawberry: A late addition to our garden, so only a few fruits, but wow were they sweet! Hope it makes it through the cold winter in our planter boxes.
