The garden keeps its own minutes.

The balcony in its fourth September

Fourth September on the balcony, and the census is short: rosemary in the terracotta pot that has outlived two addresses; chives, always; the olive tree that is technically alive in the way a library book is technically read. Everything else — the tomatoes, the attempt at peppers, one dignified squash — has joined the great compost of experience.

The lesson of four years is that a north-facing balcony above a bakery supports exactly three plants well and one gardener's ego barely. We have stopped fighting the shadow. This year the herbs went where the light actually lands, and for the first time the balcony looks like a decision instead of an apology.

“A garden doesn't grow plants. It grows the gardener's patience, and occasionally some chives.”

What the slugs left

The allotment ledger, kept honestly since spring, records eleven lettuces planted and two harvested, a differential explained entirely by gastropods with the appetites of critics. We tried the beer traps, which drowned four slugs and, we suspect, watered the rest. The copper tape worked for one bed and one week.

What actually worked was February's forgotten decision: a border of gravel wide enough to make the crossing tedious. Not deadly — tedius. Slugs, it turns out, are optimists but not athletes, and a dry, scratchy commute defeats more of them than any trap we purchased in hope.

A compost diary, month nine

Month nine of the heap, and it has at last stopped being a pile of intentions. The thermometer we bought in a flush of science reads warm on turning days; the smell, our only honest instrument, went from 'kitchen' to 'forest floor' somewhere in August and stayed.

The system that finally worked, after two failed geometries: three bays — one filling, one cooking, one emptying onto the beds — and a rule that nothing goes in bigger than a hand. Everything else the books said turned out to be negotiable except patience, which is the entire subscription fee.

Buying soil, a small economics

The first year we spent a shocking amount on bags of soil and called it an investment in well-being, which is what people say when a hobby has taken a job's salary. This year the spreadsheet says: the herbs paid for the garden twice over, the tomatoes are luxury goods at these prices, and the compost heap, slow as it is, has quietly become the most productive square meter we own.