I've been doing a bit of the Farmer John thing on the front stoop of our brownstone this spring and summer. I started by planting seeds for spinach, lima beans, peas, tomatoes and sunflowers. The results were decidedly mixed.
The seeds did an excellent job of sprouting, but after that many things went downhill. The spinach looked like some kind of refugee from a famine plagued vegetable land. The peas didn't fare much better. In the end I got 16 peas out of the crop. They were damn tasty, but, still. The lima beans were also a complete disaster. They were doing very well, until every last one succumbed to a fungus unique to lima bean plants. Wiped out the whole crop.
This leaves the tomatoes and the sunflowers, which have proven to be relatively successful. There are 16 cherry tomato plants, and they are all doing pretty well, although next year I need to plant them in larger containers and with fewer plants per container. The sunflowers are the big success. They're now over eight feet tall, and are now starting to bloom. I'm going to get a good recipe for toasting the seeds, which look to be plentiful. Of course, I'll have to fight the birds for them.
