Tips for Growing Flowers and Vegetables
After the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020, my way of life changed a great deal. That year, because of the city lockdowns, going out was very inconvenient, and we were forced to look for some happiness close to home. As I rode my bicycle around the outskirts of Mentougou and Haidian, I happened to discover that both districts rented out vegetable plots, so I rented a small plot and grew my own vegetables. At the same time, I also found an idle, well-lit platform of about 6-8 square meters in my residential compound, set some flowerpots on it, and began growing vegetables and flowers in the pots.
Before I knew it, this planting life has continued into its sixth year, and my growing experience has grown steadily. I am a farmer's son, so I was not completely ignorant of planting flowers and vegetables, but after leaving the countryside for so many years I was still rather rusty when I first started. Over the past five-plus years, as I kept experimenting, I gradually accumulated a great deal of growing experience.
By now my small garden is not only well ordered but also more productive than the other small plots around it. The vegetables I first grew on the balcony basically never grew large, rarely fruited, or bore very small fruit, and tasted poor. Today, the chili peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and eggplants grown in my balcony pots are even more productive than those in the vegetable plot, and they taste quite good. This may be because I tend the balcony garden more closely; after all, it is right at home in my own courtyard, so tending it is far more convenient.
In my balcony garden I grew not only some vegetables but also several kinds of flowers—gardenias, jasmine, winter roses (Kalanchoe), and lotus—and all of them grow very well. The flowers I grow now have long blooming periods, bloom profusely, and grow quickly.
After these years of growing, my level has indeed improved a lot. When I first grew vegetables and flowers, I did not know much about top-dressing. At the beginning of spring, the garden rental side provided two bags of chicken-manure fertilizer, and I simply applied all of it to the soil as a base dressing and did not top-dress again all year. Later I gradually mastered the technique of top-dressing. Now I top-dress the vegetable plot every half month or month, and the balcony pots every one to two weeks, mixing organic fertilizer with chemical fertilizer. By comparing, I have found that this gives the best result.
The organic fertilizer is mainly concentrated, fermented chicken manure; this kind of fertilizer improves soil quality, making the soil loose and aerated, and organic fertilizer has more complex constituents that supply many of the elements plants need, but its effect is slow. For chemical fertilizer I choose compound fertilizer, which contains the main elements plants need, such as N, P, and K. Compound fertilizer acts fast: after applying it, crops grow quickly and bear much large fruit, but it does have some damaging effect on the soil. Combining the two perfectly balances fertilizer effect with soil improvement.
At first I was also fixated on purely organic growing, but as my chemical and biological knowledge grew, I realized there was really no need to be so rigid. Vegetables grown with this mixed-fertilizing strategy do not taste worse than those grown purely organically, yet yield considerably more. When growing flowers, there is even less reason to care whether chemical fertilizer is used.
Fertilizing requires controlling the amount and the interval between top-dressings. I follow the principle of "small meals, many times": each top-dressing is half the recommended amount, and the frequency is slightly increased. This both avoids burning the seedlings and ensures the plants have enough nutrition in the middle and late growth stages.
Besides top-dressing, watering is also key to ensuring good crop growth. I have a principle: whether in balcony pots or the vegetable plot, I always keep a certain moisture level and do not let the soil stay dry for too long. So I water quite frequently; when the temperature is high, the balcony garden is watered almost once or twice a day, and the vegetable plot every 2-3 days, all with recycled waste water.
At first, neighboring gardeners who saw my plot always moist advised me to let the soil dry out for a while, believing that constant watering might rot the crop roots. But later, seeing that my vegetables grew markedly better than their own, they stopped advising me and instead began to copy me.
Another moisture-retaining trick is to leave some grass around the roots of the vegetables or flowers. Whether I grow flowers or vegetables, I dislike weeding. The plots next to mine are rarely seen to have weeds, and I always smile and tell my wife that those uncles and aunties are truly too diligent; if they really went to the countryside to farm, with their painstaking weeding attitude, farming one mu of land would wear them out. I grew up in the countryside as a child and never saw villagers coddling their vegetables like this; every household's garden had plenty of weeds, and the villagers' vegetables seemed to grow much better than the vegetables in these Beijing "happy gardens."
From a biological point of view, leaving some grass creates a community effect. Various plants spontaneously form a small ecosystem, growing together and actually doing better. Grass helps the vegetables retain water, and some insects or microbes under the grass act as decomposers, helping the vegetables obtain nutrients from the environment. Only when weeds become truly rampant is it necessary to hoe them; the hoed grass is left on the ground to dry, then buried back in, which both increases fertility and makes the soil looser. My vegetable plot's soil has always been looser and more aerated than others'; perhaps it is because I handle weeds differently from them.
After five or six years of growing, those rusty farming tasks are now familiar again. If I went back to farming crops today, I could basically do it well. Of course, I will probably never go back to farming in this life; but I love gardening, and having these two small spaces to grow some vegetables and flowers already satisfies me greatly.
Since middle age, my life has grown increasingly frugal; more than half of my balcony planters were picked up. When someone in the compound renovates, some flowerpots the new owners do not want appear in the trash pile, and I take them home, wash them, and use them. Some people also throw away their dying flowers or green plants, which I sometimes rescue; after placing them on my balcony garden, fertilizing and watering correctly for a week or two, and trimming off the withered yellow leaves, another lush potted plant emerges—that feeling is truly wonderful.
A couple of days ago I went to the flower market to buy a few green plants, and a shopkeeper familiar to me gave me a whole pile of dying flowers and green plants, charging me only ten yuan in total. There were really too many of them, and most were half-dead; deep down I did not want them. But the lady boss said: please take them, for the sake of the lives they are. These flowers can only come back to life in your hands; in anyone else's they would not survive, and left in my shop they are certain to die. Saving a flower's life is better than building a seven-story pagoda—please, have mercy.
That speech made me laugh on the spot, and in the end I placed all those flowers on my balcony garden as she wished. Over these days they have all recovered; I trimmed off the withered yellow leaves with scissors, and they are thriving again. It seems I am fated to spend my life dealing with life sciences—to be not only a doctor of humans but also a doctor of plants.