The Wedding Planner

Homer: "Now what is a wedding? Well, Webster's dictionary describes a wedding as: the process of removing weeds from one's garden."

My apartment has a balcony and ever since I moved in I've had a half-hearted intention of doing some container gardening. My main excuse for not doing so yet is my main excuse for not doing anything: I'm lazy. I want to do it well, which requires planning, which requires research, which requires useful references, which requires research, which...ahh, nuts to that.

I got an extra jolt of motivation recently in conversation with friends. I recognize a lot of flower names and I recognize a variety of flowers, but I have a hard time matching the flower with the name, especially if all I have is the name, which is all I get in conversation. Wildflower field guides aren't much help for garden-flower identification, so I found my way to gardening guides, and as I was looking at them anyway why not plan a container garden? The timing seems to be good: it's late summer now, so if I keep at it I might have the plan planned in time for spring purchasing and planting.

I've been looking through seven books and been overwhelmed so last night I went through them to see how each would be most useful. Two are my very own so they went into the "ignore for now" pile; of the 5 library books, one is a good garden-plant reference (although quite hefty for a field guide, so it's just as well that it's not), one is good for implementing an existing plan, and three are good for planning. Three are much less overwhelming than seven.

Looking through those three books I was still amazed by the number of factors that need to be considered in planning a balcony container garden. Plants in the actual ground get some economy-of-scale protection but plants in containers are more or less completely naked to the elements. And since the balcony is really the only location I have there won't be a lot of trying out of new ones if a first doesn't seem to work. So besides all the basic plant requirements I really have to know the specifics of my site, and also be careful about how much weight I put on the balcony. I think the light is going to be the first consideration since it's the one I can't control. Sadly we're two months past the summer solstice and I wasn't paying attention to the sun during that time.

What I need is a database of plants that allows filtering by multiple criteria. Books aren't great because even if they contain all of the information I want it's only organized by one or two. So I think that's going to be my first major activity: building and populating a database to help me identify (and, I hope, choose) what plants to plant, given the conditions on my balcony.