The past weeks haven been extremely warm and sunny here in Switzerland, and it has given a great boost to the flowers we have on the balcony. I finally removed the radishes that seemed to take too much space against the other species and for a limited return. At the end, only the four I had removed turned into eatable roots, while the other furher grew and bloomed for a while but did not become wider. This I guess is related to the start of the journey on cotton pads, where too many plants shared little space. I also noted that it is highly water intensive for such a unique plant, so at the end I decided not to plant the last radish seeds I still had.
Instead I decided to go for flowers only. I used the last packs that we got for free at Migros, and added a "biodiversity mix" from the supermarket, with a lot of wild species that are supposed to grow fast and help our little bees do their work nicely (see middle-top picture). These ones bloomed very fast, and it's been lovely to see the various types of leaves making their way through the soil and out.
The other flower sets are part of my son's project and can show him how diverse nature is. The yellow dill flowers on the right pic are super cute, they look like little satellites, and I have been frustrated not to be able to do macro pictures with my phone. Once in a while a whasp makes her way around, which is a nice sight as my bumblebee friends have left a while ago. We also planted a potato, which turned into a very beautiful, harmonic-looking plant. Not sure much will happen with it on the long term as we'd need more space for it, but this is already a positive outcome we can be proud of.
As you can see also, the tomatoes and the basil are living their best lives (with full sun exposure from 1pm until 9pm I bet they do) and growing nicely. They demand however a lot of water, and I have had to attach the tomato plants with a sophisticated, again-totally-freestyle systems of ropes, to make sure they do not crack from the fruits' weight or the heavy wind of the sometimes-violent summer storms. So far I have counted around 20 growing fruits, let's see how many will make it at the end.