May was a great month for the Greenground Map as it was picked as a Map of the Month at Stanfords! This means a lot to me as Stanfords is the best travel bookshop in the world and seeing a Greenground Map on their window is pretty much a dream come true. A nice review also appeared on Telegraph Travel, which generated quite a few visits to the homepage. If all the months were as successful as May I would be doing quite well, but of course once the buzz quiets down, so does the traffic on the homepage and I need to start thinking of something new.. But for now, I can just enjoy the spotlight and celebrate this amazing success!
Something like this could get your head spin, so I was keeping grounded by continuing the balcony garden project, which has seen both successes and failures (all part of the learning curve). Beginning of the May was extremely cold and the temps dropped way below freezing with snow, which turned out to be fatal for all the berry bushes. Then two weeks later the heatwave arrived and persisted for the next two weeks, which dried the raspberry stems.. I also got a bit too excited with scissors and removed all the old gooseberry stems. But gooseberries produce berries on second-year stems, which means I’m not sure if we have any berries at all this summer!
The seedlings still inside during the cold spell have been doing mostly well. More tomatoes sprouted I have space for. I was hoping for 6 plants and ended up with 14 (!), so had to gift some away and donate to a plant swap event. The peppers, kale and beet are growing steadily, and so do the herbs, especially parsley. The only plant I had trouble with was rhubarb. I’ve heard they are notoriously hard to grow from seedlings, but couldn’t imagine how challenging this is! Of 12 seeds only one rhubarb plant sprouted and is still a tender seedling after months of careful nursing.
Balcony gardening sometimes feels like cheating as your plants will be protected from some of the ground pests. But this doesn’t mean your plants are safe from all of them. When the first woolly cocoon appeared on the blackcurrant stem I got suspicious and found a colony of insects sticking on the branches. After some research, I found out these were woolly-scale insects. They look exactly like the bark, hence it took me so long to discover them! I gave the plant a good scrub with a toothbrush and some diluted eco washing liquid and will keep my fingers crossed this solves the problem.
By the end of the month tomatoes and cucumbers were growing so fast (about 5 cm a day) I had to work out, how to build a support system for them. In the end, I decided to go with simple bamboo sticks and tied the string loosely around the plants. I also homed the moon strawberries to their planter box I built in spring. They have been doing surprisingly well, considering how tiny the seedlings were at first. As Pähkel naturally assumed this was all for her to trample in, I had to cover it up with mesh. She has already claimed two planters and there’s no way she is going to have the third!
As I was watching everything grow I was thinking how the Greenground Map was born from my love of walking and nature, but growing takes us one step closer rooting us more steadily into the ecosystem. I’ve felt much calmer since I started my small permaculture garden and despite some failures, the successes make it all worthwhile! I believe everyone should have a go at growing their own food, so I decided to make a bonus edition map adding the Grow line with the first 120+ community gardens. Maybe in time, this will evolve into a completely separate map with hundreds of growing spaces open to everyone!
Next time I will be talking more about my companion plants and using all the available growing space on the balcony.
Helen Ilus 