My New Garden!

The 365 Lifestyle Lolita Challenge topic for April 12th was "Create a wishlist of flowers you would plant in a garden," but because my garden shopping for this year was coming up soon, anyway, I decided to turn it into a blog post about my new balcony gardens!

Sage, lavender, rosemary

Sweet basil, onion chives, and lemon
thyme

They're so cute~ I plan on hunting down some other plants that the stores we went to didn't have (Since two of my planters have space for more), but for now, we've got quite the collection!

Lavender and Rosemary

Sweet basil

Lemon thyme

I love keeping an herb garden for making tea, cooking, and for a few other things (sage makes a great rinse for brown hair), and I'm very excited to have one again! Before now, I've always lived in a stand-alone dwelling and had a yard, so my plants could go directly in the ground, but this is my first time in an apartment. Railing planters were necessary. They're easy enough to put up, but I would definitely recommend putting them all together during the day (instead of at night, like me).

I'm also ecstatic to have these! They might look like regular old strawberry plants, but these are, in fact, pineberries!

Ripe pineberries-- mine probably won't
look this pretty.

Pineberries are a hybridization of the Chilean and Virginia strawberries, and were originally native to South America. White with red seeds, these little berries are supposed to taste like pineapples! I first learned about these in early 2011, when I was researching hybrid foods for a project about genetically modified organisms in a high school Microbiology class, but these little guys wouldn't be available commercially in the U.S. until a year later.

Because they didn't do "well" ("critical responses were mixed" says Wikipedia), pineberries were restyled as "Hulaberries" in 2015 and can now be found as plants in Home Depot. In fact, while desperately trying to hunt down chamomile at 9:30pm, that's where I stumbled upon them and eagerly snatched up a set of starters!

  

Now, if I had the space to grow flowers, I'd probably stick with snapdragons, marigolds, geraniums, and roses. I could probably squeeze some snapdragons and marigolds out onto the real balcony, but definitely not rose bushes. One day, I'll have a yard again!

What are some flowers that you all would like to plant? What do you like to keep in your garden? Let me know or link me to your own blog posts in the comments below!