I’ve been farming virtual popcorn on this blog for a while now, but this year Megan and I decided to try our hand at some plants for our back porch.  The term porch is a bit generous, it is more likely an empty concrete swimming pool sticking off the back of our townhouse, but at least it is outside!

Back in May we bought some plants from the town farmers’ market to grow in pots on the porch.  We started with three types of flowers, two Early Girl tomato plants, and some cilantro.  We added basil a few weeks later.

Many of the plants have been growing well since then. The tomatoes started sprouting tomatoes a few weeks ago, although they haven’t grown much since then. The pansies and “pink” flowers have been doing great, although the snapdragons lost all their flowers and didn’t seem very happy after a week. We haven’t had much luck with the cilantro either… it quickly shot up very tall and sprouted flowers.

Originally we planted everything in pots that were much too small. Last weekend I repotted all the herbs and fed them and the tomatoes with some organic plant food. I did an experiment with the basil and only gave half of the plants the food… after one week its pretty clear that it does make a difference!

I’ll let you guess which is which…

The biggest surprise in our garden came the morning after we had a very violent thunderstorm at the end of May. We went down to check how the plants were doing and found this little guy hiding among the flowers! I have no idea how we got there–our porch is 10 feet above ground level and cement on all sides. My only guess is he was up in one of the trees to the side of our porch and parachuted down.