decorating with succulents

We are all in love with succulents, right? Since writing this post on repotting succulents last year mine have been growing along nicely but some started to look spindly in their pots. Time for a succulent makeover!

I brought all indoor plants out to the balcony for a good repotting and makeover. The smaller succulents would be sweet grouped together in a pot, so I put together little succulent scenes.

By the way, do you see the sad spider plant on the right in the photo above? My cats love to nibble at the ends…

All nice and new and ready to come back inside. I’ve heard it’s good for indoor succulents to spend some time outside in the summer but it’s not warm or dry enough yet and they’ve actually done very well being inside only in the last few years.

The balcony garden is doing pretty well too! The strawberries will be our first harvest. We’ve already had a taste of the tiny wild strawberries and the big ones are getting ready too.

The sugar snap peas have flowered and started to produce and the little apple tree seems all set to produce more than last year’s one apple.

Kale is my new favorite food to grow on a balcony, so easy and fast!

The only thing giving trouble is the salad. It’s growing extremely well but is having problems with thrips or whiteflies. Anyone have a non-toxic suggestion to get rid of these? I would be eternally grateful.

I caved and bought some flowers too. The ones I am growing from seed are taking their sweet time and I needed a bit of color to liven things up a bit.

Now all that remains is to wait for summer so the tomato and pepper plants will get a dose of warmth and sun and hit a growth spurt.

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growing food

My fingers are a bit raw from scrubbing to get the soil out from under my nails. I had forgotten how dirty gardening is. Or how good it feels to spend a few hours outside digging in the dirt. Time for an update on my balcony garden!

The tomato seedlings are coming along well and are in the hardening off stage already.

We (meaning person, animal and plant) have been soaking up every last bit of sunshine and warmth and the apple tree is gratefully pushing out blossoms. I take this as a very good sign that there will be more than one apple (last year’s harvest) this time.


The peas are poking their cute first leaves through the soil. Yes, I just called peas cute. Such a proud plant mama. I made them a trellis from some leftover pieces since I couldn’t find a suitable mesh but I’ll still need to hunt down some sticks in the woods to add to it.


A few early flowers are really brightening the space up while all the other plants and flowers are just getting started.


In addition to starting the tomatoes and peppers inside in my light box the more cold hardy crops have been doing well in a little foil greenhouse outside.
The salad boxes are overflowing and in dire need to be thinned out and the kale is ready to move into its own window box as well.
Hard to describe how satisfying it is to watch all these seedlings growing strong and big. A very primal feeling of content. We may be creatures of polished office work and smartphones by day but doing things by hand – be it growing food, or knitting, sewing, woodworking, building, you name it – is a need that runs deep.

spring fever

Spring is here and as always, I am so excited to get out and grow things! We’ve had unnaturally warm and sunny weather in the past few weeks and the balcony is already coming alive – sorry US readers, I’m just telling it how it is. We had the never ending winter last year!


My seed order has arrived and I’ve started most of them. This year I will be growing tomatoes (a personal variety from a friend of a friend’s garden in Spain), peppers, lots of salads, sugar snap peas, spinach and kale. That’s the plan anyway. The hardy herbs, mints and strawberries are waking up from their winter sleep too.


New on the list this year are flowers, I will be trying violets, nasturtiums and snapdragons to brighten up our little space. The calendula seeds I mixed in here and there last year have survived the winter and this little guy was the first splash of color to surprise us a week ago.

To start seeds I have three ‘classes’ of plants: Some are started indoors and kept inside until the end of May. These are the delicate tomatoes and peppers as well as some flowers. I have set up my DIY light box again, which has served me very well in past years.
There’s also a little poly greenhouse on the balcony (just a shelf with foil cover) which acts as a cold frame where I grow the salads, kale and some flowers. Others such as the peas and spinach can be started our in the open directly.


There’ll be updates on this little balcony garden frequently throughout the growing season.
What are you growing this year?

harvesting and knitting and dyeing

The tomatoes keep on coming.

I grew four varieties on our balcony this year. The sweet and tiny red one are easiest to grow in containers whereas the Green Zebras and Black Plums were a bit disappointing. The tastiest is a pink beef tomato from Spain, the seeds coming from the brother of a friend’s own garden. It produced only a few fruits but they were very good!
My mom grew them in her garden and when allowed to root deeply these grow into the hugest tomatoes ever.

She’s picking them to ripen indoors since the weather has turned cooler.

Speaking of cooler weather, I’ve picked up some knitting again that got cast aside in spring. This pea green cowl in seed stitch turned out to be almost done, it just needed joining and weaving in the ends.


The dress I’m wearing is years old and was originally a dark grey. I’ve always loved the fit but hated the color, so I decided to try dyeing it in the washing machine. It was that or putting it on the donation pile. The dyeing turned out to be the easiest thing ever! Here’s a before and after:

Now I can’t stop thinking what else I’d like to dye! I dyed an old blazer as well but unfortunately it didn’t take the color much. I should have looked at the fiber content first…still, it’s a bit better than before:

The fall sock knitting is progressing nicely too. A couple more nights and these should be done.

Recently I’ve been digging out old books again. Some of the books you read as a child always stay with you I guess and it’s lovely getting back into the old stories. Some of these are quite old and were actually handed down to me by my mother.
One of my favourites is a story about a young norwegian girl leaving the isolated area she grew up in to live and work in the city, going through many hardships but finally achieving not only a school diploma but also starting her own business. A simple but heartwarming story and quite modern considering it was published in the 1950’s and is set sometime in the 1930’s and 1940’s! In fact, there are only a few passages that clearly date the story (for example when the protagonist gets pregnant and everyone she announces it to insists on downing a bottle of bubbly with her!). Apparently these were only published in german and scandinavian languages, but if you can read either, look up the author Berte Bratt for the “Anne” trilogy.

bits and pieces

While a full, coherent post is lurking in my drafts (it’s about a gift I can’t give away for another few days or weeks), here’s a jumble of pictures from the last few weeks.
Like apparently half the handmade blogosphere I’ve rediscovered my love for sock knitting in the middle of summer. Now it’s just a matter of deciding which of the five unfinished pairs of socks I will try to complete. Following craft logic it will probably be the pair that has been barely started.

The kitties have not enjoyed the summer heat (though it hasn’t dimmed their love for thick warm carpets) and are looking forward to cooler weather.

I threw a suprise baby party for my pregnant best friend which was a great success. It was a bit like a party in our teenage days, with silly games and cake and a good chat.

The balcony plants have done well and the tomatoes are ready for picking!


These flowers came up unexpectedly and I can’t stop admiring them.


Looking forward to getting the balcony ready for fall!

repotting succulents

I’ve talked about my love of succulents before. I’ve had them inside our apartment for less than two years and they grown so well and produced many baby succulents in that time. They were also starting to outgrow their pots so I took them all down for a sorting and repotting.

I just cut off all baby plants that had formed on the sides and put them in their own pots. Succulents are just soo easy…just pop them in a new pot with earth and they’ll root and be happy.

All done and ready to come back inside!

waiting for summer

A mish-mash of topics today…
I discovered my love of succulents a few years ago (RosaMaria may have been responsible because she always posts beautiful succulent shots). I’ve a small collection at home which is thriving and I’m always busy propagating little cuttings. They grow slowly but steadily and really are the easiest plants ever.


I don’t seem to be alone in this either, since this print of a blooming succulent, taken in Italy during a summer visit to friends of ours, is by far the most popular in my Etsy shop:

In other news, the strawberries on my balcony are putting out fruit like mad this year and I’m looking forward to harvesting. Nothing compares to the taste of a homegrown strawberry. Mine are just past the flowering stage but the farmer’s market carried some strawberries already so we made the first smoothie of the year.

We also did a thrift store round again recently and while also picking up some practical stuff like vases and sports clothes for hiking, I indulged in several vintage square scarves.
These silk scarves are hard to find new (old is so much cooler anyway) and I’ve wanted to try this 1940’s headscarf tutorial for ages.

Love this hairstyle, it’s just so “artsy” . I’m wearing my scarves all the time. I’ll just have to find a way to better secure them on my head…my hair is fine and very slippery so they just want to slip right off.
I got so many scarves that I almost have one for every outfit.

More random things I loved this week:

• I saw The Great Gatsby yesterday (really liked it) so I’m now considering getting even more scarves to wear them like lovely Carey does
• April from Blacksburg Belle always has great tipps for small business owners, I follow her blog religiously. This video post on time management particularly hit home and has some awesome tipps I will incorporate in my work schedule from now on!
• Sherrie wrote a very inspiring post about the concept of enough, which reminded me why I strive for minimalism in my life (ahem, thrift store shopping and compulsive accumulation of plants excluded)

loving

this spring and sunshine. So, so much!



Maybe it was the long winter and cold this year, but I’m still soaking up every ray of sunshine I can get and watching my balcony and the world around me come to life feels invigorating.

Hello, italian mint!

The ponies are happy too, finally it’s time for freedom and green grass again after spending winter in their stalls.

Love these little flowers! My mom gave me a few from her garden last year but they never bloomed. I kept them all the same and this year they’re blooming in lovely colours from pale rosey to bright orange to lush dark red!

And finally, I’m feeling creative again after a late winter lurch and look forward to getting back to my sewing machine soon. The dress above is from Zara, it was so gorgeous I had to have it even though it’s polyester. Oh, all the Downton Abbey inspired prettiness of Zara’s spring collection! I love how TV inspires fashion. I spent all weekend trying to wrap my head around how it is made so I can make my own copy in a cotton silk or even (imagine!) some luxurious washed silk.

spring!

So, my mood has increased exponentially in the last few days because it is actually, finally, spring around here! Warm wind, sunshine and the earthy smell of nature waking up.
All the better because I had a day off today and spent a wonderfully relaxing morning on the balcony, soaking up sunshine and the “Call the midwife” series by Jennifer Worth (SO good). I literally feel like a new person, and this even though I spent all day Sunday scratching old wallpaper off the walls of a friend’s new house and should logically feel tired and sore today.



The balcony is coming to life with a few flowers I picked up at the nursery and the sight of them cheers me up no end. Some tomato and pepper seedlings are thriving indoors in my trusty light box. I can’t wait for nature to really take off this year!

Ok, here’s something I meant to blog about last year but never got around to: Ever since coming across vermicomposting on a stay in Canada four years ago I had been meaning to try it. So well over a year ago, despite all funny looks of our friends and relatives (vermicomposting is virtually unknown here) we set up a worm bin and bought a few small red worms at a nearby fishing shop, crossing our fingers they’d be the right type of worm.


I started off well, feeding them reguarly with heaps of kitchen scraps and wet newspaper. And then…I kind of forgot about them. I guess there is no excuse for neglecting animals in your care, even if they are only worms but there you go. The bin was in a hard to reach area and out of sight and the worms didn’t exactly complain about being hungry. The box never started to smell and it just sat there, through summer and fall and winter until I mustered up the courage to open it this weekend and take a peek.
Well, you can all breathe a sigh of relief if you were feeling sorry for the worms because I am happy to report they are alive and well and in the course of a year have reduced a full box of kitchen scraps to this:

Wonderful, rich compost which my tomatoes and peppers will love (and they’re still working on the egg shells apparently)! Awesome job, wormies, and I promise to feed you again and not forget you for another year!

itching

My 8/52 photo, a sweet but totally crazy dog at our barn.

As you can see, still very much winter over here, snowy and grey. Frozen pipes at the barn.


I am so ready for spring, and sunshine, and color, and flowers. I’ve made my balcony garden plans and I’m itching to start my seeds and to give the balcony a good scrub and clean up.
Just a few more weeks now.
Until then, I’m making baby succulents (well, the plants are doing all the work really, I just give all the baby succulent shoots their own pots and water occasionally).

I was given some tulips at the farmer’s market last weekend as a thank you for giving one of the vendors an awesome pumpkin ginger soup recipe (do you want it? it’s super yummy and the vendor said it worked wonders for his date).


So good to have some color in the apartment! And speaking of color, I got some lovely summer fabrics in the mail and I’ve been dreaming up ways to use them for weeks. No actual sewing going on, I’m taking a little break after the red skirt and waiting for sun and motivation to show their faces around here.


There’s hope I’ll be getting some knitting finished though! And, saving the best for last, a sneak peek at some vintage patterns I scored on Etsy lately. I won’t be showing them in full because they’ll be presents for friends if/when I make them 🙂