thinning out

We edit the garden again and we're more pleased with the space we've taken back. Being a first time gardener, I was a bit overly zealous about growing things. We started off with seeds but I didn't realize I had to thin them out, and when I did, I felt bad about getting rid of the seedlings. Well, I eventually thinned out the herd! Any of the tomato plants that we have that were not producing were chucked. It sounds cruel but we've adopted a policy in the balcony garden. Each plant must earn their keep by producing fruit or flower. We got rid of 3 or 4 unproductive tomato plants. The balcony feels more spacious now and the surviving plants have room to grow bigger.

The marigolds seem to have sprouted all the flowers it could so I removed the whole plants. I noticed one of the basil plants was being eaten by something so I removed that plant. I removed a nasturtium plant too. I got rid of some other herbs too that were not replenshing.

Despite the sad news of having to get rid of some plants, there are some goods news to share. I noticed a couple of the cayenne peppers started to turn color. In fact, I used one in a chili I cooked this past weekend. One of the chili pepper plants has finally produced jalapeño peppers. I guess my manual pollination paid off. I foresee fresh salsa in the near future!

And a cluster of yellow pear-shaped tomatoes ripened this past weekend and I made a tiny tomato salad with some basil from the garden. These little guys were very juicy, sweet, and flavorful. There's more of these to come! We planted these from seeds and we have a few of them plants. And they're producing clusters left and right and continuing to grow taller!

And in fact, I noticed one of the red tomatoes have started to turn color. We were beginning to worry if they would ever ripen or if we would be eating green tomatoes, which we did as a few had fallen off as we were reorganizing the plants on the balcony. I eventually made fried green tomatoes with them, and they tasted great! I also tried green tomatoes with salt and fresh cracked green peppercorns and they also tasted great!