Plant census

[igenlode]

I had twelve hours' notice as of last night that the builders (whose arrival has been repeatedly delayed over a period of years, and which I had only half-believed was actually going to happen) were going to turn up this morning, and that I would need to clear my entire balcony to give them access. I've been trying to clear things out over the last couple of weeks on the off-chance that this might happen, and thought I'd managed to get rid of about half my plants, but of course it turned out that was a *vast* underestimate!

I've cut down and uprooted everything I could bear to cut down, including things that were still in flower or still had fruit on (I'm now drying a second batch of chillies, the remaining green ones). I pruned my bonsai birch severely -- it has needed doing for some time, but I hope it survives the process. The leaves were beginning to change colour and drop, which theoretically means it is not too dormant to heal the cuts but is no longer active enough to attempt to replace the lost growth by sending out soft new shoots that will simply get frosted.

I dug up the buddleia from the trough (the pak choi weren't even worth harvesting) and put it into a smaller pot on its own, in the hopes of limiting its growth and potentially being able to grow other things in the trough. If all the roots in there really did belong to the buddleia I'm not surprised the other things weren't thriving... at any rate, it has had a severe root trim. The bonsai almost certainly needed root trimming and fresh soil as well, but I didn't spare the time to look :-(

I saved one pot of rudbeckia and one of marigolds, the ones that were flowering best -- the rudbeckia may have been a waste of space, since it had been clambering up through the heritage cherry tomatoes and was flowering on the ends of vastly long stems, which will flop everywhere without their support. I cut back the sweetbriar as best I could, painfully; it is still in a bigger pot than anything else.

And after I had disposed of everything I could while keeping the herbs and the 'permanent' plants and everything I am propagating for next year, I still had three times the number of pots that I had the last time I went through this process -- and had to put down vast amounts of sheeting indoors to stand them on, since wood flooring and wet pots do not mix :-(

Total list

Box 1

• California poppy (for next year)
• Roma tomato (it would probably have made more sense to harvest the green fruit, as I did with all the other tomatoes, but I did want to see if I could get them a little bigger, as the plant still seems to be vigorous)
• some tiny little plump mesembryanthemum seedlings which had turned out to have self-sowed when I came to empty the tray - I want to see whether I can overwinter them using my plastic mini-greenhouse. Probably not!
• bonsai silver birch
• thyme -- either dying or dying back for the winter, and at this point I honestly can't tell which
• spring onions (had died down, are now shooting again from the bulb)
• a small pot of assorted marigold/calendula seedlings removed from other pots in which they had self-sown -- I have been donating these to people

Box 2

• baby garlic
• Cumbrian yellow poppy (transplanted out of the rose pot and into the pot with the other one, which has died back but is presumably still under the soil somewhere)
• the youngest (self-sown this summer), smallest and most vigorous of the flowering marigolds
• more of the garlic
• a single specimen of the myriad poached-egg plants which have been self-sowing everywhere, inserted into a smaller pot on its own
• a pot of alyssum, rescued from pots where it had self-seeded (I did get a little seed off the ripe plants -- and then discovered there was still some wedged after all at the bottom of the original seed packet!)
• a beetroot which germinated from spent compost in which baby salad greens had been grown :-) It doesn't have much of a root, so I thought I'd just leave it another year (this is its second) and see what happened..
• an unknown plant that looks rather like a strawberry and sends out runners like a strawberry, but isn't! I'm still waiting to see if it is going to flower, having kept it two years in the hopes that it might...
• more garlic
• a rooted strawberry runner
• a coriander seedling
• another coriander seedling
• another strawberry
• an unknown self-sown feathery seedling, being grown on to find out what it is :-p
• more garlic (that single clove did have an awful lot of bulbils, and I thought I ought to split them to give them more of a chance)
• the fourth and last strawberry runner
• evening primroses (probably overcrowded; only one flowered this year and none last year)
• bonsai holly
• a little pot of purple toadflax (though I did uproot the ivy-leaved toadflax, reckoning that it would probably regrow somewhere or other of its own accord!)

Box 3

• mint (now died down for the winter, with the dead bits barbered off)
• oregano (cut back considerably -- I saved the clippings in a bag in the fridge, and put half in a tomato sauce last night)
• My miniature rose, which successfully re-leafed itself
• an unknown silvery-leafed plant, which I have been told the name of but which I have forgotten -- it is supposed to have a tall flower spike but after two years is yet to do so. It originally self-seeded in a ridiculously small pot and survived for a year in that, so is clearly very tough indeed -- but it might need an even larger pot in order to flower :-)
• the 'wildflower seed' that never actually flowered, although the cornflowers, corn-marigolds etc. that germinated along with it did. It may be a biennial, or it may again be overcrowded.
• another unknown self-sown plant that I suspect may be a hollyhock, in which case it will grow much too large...

And also:

• Sweetbriar canes, in a very large pot downstairs because there was no room for them with the other plants
• lettuce-leaved basil (which spent almost the entire summer being shaded out by the shoo-fly plants which germinated in what was nominally going to be the basil pot, and as a result matured later and thus didn't die back so soon) balanced on the kitchen windowsill waiting to be used up before it dies off

As I said, there did seem to be an awful lot of it left over after I'd thrown away vast volumes of foliage! Not to mention huge numbers of snails -- they were probably quite harmlessly engaged in disposing of decaying vegetable matter, but I carried out the traditional ritual of hurling them away at the full force of my arm in the hopes that they would proceed to settle on Someone Else's Plants instead wherever they landed. Normally this just leads to them 'homing' again, but the Discus rotundatus snails really are so tiny and the climb so high that I feel most of them probably won't. And if they were carrying out a useful job... well, I found more than enough snail eggs in the earth as I was emptying the pots to replenish the population :-p)

I also encountered ridiculously large numbers of worms in the pots that I was emptying out -- given that it is basically an isolated ecosystem in the sky, they are presumably massively inbred and all descended from a single stray worm or egg! I evacuated them all to the various pots that I wasn't emptying, but given that many of those are pretty small I wonder if there will be enough soil to support them all. (And since the pots have to stay indoors until Saturday, when the builders are coming back, I hope they won't decide to migrate en masse across my floor in hopes of finding better accommodation elsewhere...)