My Longing To Own A Farm

   I would love to have a big, big backyard, with lots of space to grow fruit trees and square foot gardens. Several years ago, we looked at a beautiful house, and were almost set on buying it, until I went into the back yard. It had a little pool and a strip of grass on each side, which was surrounded by a wooden fence. Where's the back yard, I wondered? The realtor asked the homeowner's association if we could possibly fence the side yard, which was a fair amount of space, but the answer came back negative.
  We were looking at land last year, but never found any place suitable for us. I am still looking and hoping we can find this place that I could make into a farm. I will keep looking, but what do I do in the meantime?
   When we moved into this home, we hired the lawn mower men to do my garden beds. They set everything up as close as possible to my expectations. We transplanted a couple of blackberry plants from the old house, but didn't realize how prolific they would be! If I left the garden unattended for a couple of months, the blackberries took over and the garden looked like a jungle!
  Well, I removed many blackberry plants this year, and planted corn, tomatoes, peppers, carrots, and a host of other vegetables, but, my expectations were sadly, not met. Whenever I planted corn, it would grow to a certain height, then the corn plants would all in unison be knocked down and destroyed. The same thing happened whenever I planted sunflower seeds. I would have a nice plant until a beautiful head came on the plant. Then the head would 'fall' off in a mysterious way. I had a couple of spaghetti squash plants that were doing well, then one day, they were gashed by some garden invader. The last straw came when I planted beets and carrots in the fall. They were coming up just fine until one day when I went out into the garden to find a nicely tilled garden bed with foot prints throughout. The carrots disappeared and the beets are nowhere to be found in that bed. (I have 2 carrot plants that survived). So, I decided to do something entirely different!
   I have two balconies and am going to put some pots on them. I will put 5 different pepper plants, 5 different tomato plants, carrots, potatoes, beets, sage, Alpine Strawberries, Scarlet Runners, squash, and a few others all on the balcony. It will be interesting to see squash and beans hanging from the balcony! So, here is the start of my little farm. I have a few Smartpots containing strawberries, sage, carrots, squash (I think), Scarlet Runners, and a tomato plant, so far. The greenhouse has quite a few little plants in it. Yes, the greenhouse is on the balcony as well.
 

If you look hard enough, you can see the cat. He thinks
the dirt in the pots is litter!

My little greenhouse from amazon.com. Baby plants
are Alpine strawberries, goji berries, soursop, yellow
tomatoes, catnip, squash, avocado, purple jalepino
and pepperoncini pepper plants.

Mystery tomato plant! Either a German Lunchbox or Amish
paste. Alpine strawberries, sage (on table), yellow, purple,
and red carrots and mystery squash plant (in dark brown pot).

A view of the balcony from the back. Won't it be cool to
see squash and beans hanging from the railing?