Balcony Gardening in Beautiful Pennsylvania

From Lake Champlain,

  to Montreal, to Oneida, NY and now central Pennsylvania. In the two years since I last posted, we moved yet again and this time to central Pennsylvania.  It's a beautiful mostly rural area, home of Penn State University. Though we live in a third floor apartment in the "Victorian" village of Bellefonte we have become farmers!  We have a large west facing balcony that accommodates six planting boxes ("Earth boxes" earthbox.com).




We started out with 18 seedlings supplied by a good friend with her own greenhouse (courtesy of her professor handyman carpenter husband) comprising 6 varieties of tomatoes: purple, roma, beefsteak, paste, purple cherry and red cherry.  We "hardened" the seedlings by putting them out on the balcony during the daylight hours in April and also inadvertently contributed to the starling population who discovered our tender seedlings were quite delicious.  We ended with about 12 viable plants.

During the planting process, two seedlings ended up as compost, but 10 survived, 2 of each variety. Each earthbox holds two tomato plants; in the sixth box we planted two plants purchased from the local nursery, purple satin eggplants.  Here's a photo from May:

Now our balcony is a jungle:

Friday (July 26) we harvested our first eggplants:

There are dozens more to come and soon the tomatoes will be ripening.