Greetings fellow gardeners!
With September out of the way, October has been a welcome to my container garden. While I didn't manage to get any flowers in my garden at this point, my strawberries, gooseberries, and blueberries have been outstanding!
Blueberry
I freaking love this plant! I bought it a little over a year ago, and I believed it to be a little over a year old when I got it. I was really disappointed in it when it arrived. It barely had any leaves, no flowers, and maybe a fruit or two. However, I always wanted my own blueberry plant, so I continued to tend it for a year. Clearly speaking nicely to it through winter did a great job, because I have been rewarded with bunches of berries. Now my only problem is keeping the birds away!
Awaiting Strawberries
Many Flowers
The Other Pots
Current Harvest
While strawberries aren't technically berries (they're aggregate fruit, like pineapples), I am sharing them here because I am so proud of this plant! It started as a single vibrant strawberry plant from our local nursery last year. Once it gave a handful of fruit last year it immediately sent out runners and filled two pots, and two cans which were given away as gifts.
With South Africa's mellow winter, all but the original plant managed to survive. Sadly the original was moved by builders and placed in direct sunlight just before winter, and it died.
The one thing I did notice was that the fruit appeared cracked. I can only assume this was because they received too much water (ran and watering on my part). I noticed this with my radishes as well, which is a pain, but such it is.
Cape Gooseberries
This is one of the weirdest berries I have tried to grow. I haven't had great success with growing from seeds, though I have noticed a few came up with my homemade greenhouse. With this pot, I sowed seeds and just walked away and I got three viable plants. Two aren't doing too great, but the one is readily making flowers and berries.
If anyone ever wondered why it's called a cape gooseberry, it's because of the 'jacket' that grows around the fruit.
Baby Sugar Melon
Yes, technically Cucurbits (melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers) are all different kinds of berries! And here is my little baby sugar melon. Once it reaches maturity, this plant will grow melons the size of a softball. I sadly lost the second one I was growing for 
Cantaloupe
I was very pleased with the results of the cantaloupe planting. I put 5 seeds in and 4 seedlings popped up, not bad! See my post on their planting here. I aim to keep these guys in the water container for another week or so before I get them ready to move into other containers that I still need to go buy.
I have been looking into growing raspberries, but as they are a rambler, and I don't have anywhere for them to grow, I don't think that is on the cards this year. Maybe I'll look into that next year.
I was going to talk about my cucumbers here and the difficulties I have had with them this week (I lost two of my four), but I'm going to leave that for the next post as I want to discuss the rest of the garden later in the week.
Had a chat with Zak today and he put a thought in my head: What if I challenged my gardening friends to post more about their gardens? So 
Look at the amazing job Zak is doing with prepping his garden here.
And what about Sam's amazing veggie patch? I am jealous of how great her radishes are looking. I'm mostly only getting greens at this point!
