growing

Though I haven’t talked about it in detail yet, I have started quite a few seeds indoors again for the coming balcony gardening season. Seeing as I started a bit late last year, I made sure to be early this spring.
Our new balcony is huge, but faces southeast instead of southwest, so time will tell if the sun hungry veggie plants will be ok with that.
I’ve sown some hardy seeds in the containers outdoors already…lots of mints, some kohlrabi, lettuce, peas and such. We’ve been having a very cold spring so far though, so nothing much to show for it yet.
But indoors! Hard to believe that in only a few weeks my tiny, fragile pepper seedlings have grown from this:

to this:

As you can see, they’ve outgrown their light box already, so I am now keeping them near our sunniest window until it is warm enough to move them outside in the day.
The light box has again worked great.

I ordered a special sort of pepper this year, called Pimientos de Padron. They are small green peppers which are tossed in a pan with olive oil briefly and then sprinkled with coarse sea salt and eaten as Tapas in Spain. I love them and hope they will grow well. There’s also a few tomato plants again and I will be sowing broccoli and zucchini later this month.
I’ll try and update throughout the season again and I am already getting very excited to grow and harvest 🙂
Other than that, I am insanely busy and my weekend at the sea feels so far away already. There’s a new post on my photo blog with more beach portraits and a couple of projects are going on at the same time. I’m still sewing whenever I get the chance, but haven’t made time for photos yet. Might as well add that there’s some not so happy stuff…an aunt of mine died last weekend after a long illness and we’re alternating between being sad and feeling relieved that she is no longer suffering.
Sometimes a single day holds so many different emotions it makes me dizzy.

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gardening 2011 – part 2

*Click here for part 1*
Ok, so far I’ve only shown bits and pieces of my plants, but by now the balcony is looking quite nice so I think it’s time for an overall look.
Here it is, this is the view from the door looking out onto our balcony:

The flower boxes hold strawberries which are just now starting to bloom. In the far end corner by the chair you can see the raspberry plant and the pots underneath the flower boxes hold beans and peas or are waiting for their tomatoes and peppers (they also hold basil and parsley and calendula and bunching onions which had to go in already).
This is the view standing in the corner by the raspberry, looking toward the door and the two greenhouses:

The little wooden box and the small ladder were both thrift store finds. I had actually been looking for something like it for a while and was thrilled to find these! They hold the herbs, which will need to go back into the greenhouse should the nights get colder again. But for now I think they just look so pretty here:

Ok, so much for a general overview, back to the seedlings I’ve been fussing over for the last couple of weeks.
The tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers went out into the greenhouse permanently a week ago and yesterday I transplanted them to larger newspaper pots (look how small the first pots are looking in comparison, it was high time!). I will also need to start fertilizing now.

I hope they continue to do well, at this stage I would honestly be crushed should they die on me. The seedlings get the sunny top shelf in the greenhouses:

The top shelf in the other greenhouse is taken up by all my experiments with starting seeds directly in the greenhouse or sprouting inside and then transferring them outside (I went a little wild experimenting after I got the greenhouses). I was so scared that my first attempt would fail and now pretty much everything has sprouted and is growing and I will have so many plants to give away to friends!

And to really make you tired of seeing baby plant pics, here’s the week by week on the indoor seedlings:

Also, last but not least, the lettuce is also thriving, so much that I really need to thin it (and I can even eat the thinnings as baby lettuce, so nothing goes to waste!):

Ok, this was a marathon post, next ones will be shorter again, promise 😉

strawberries

Now that the warm weather is in full swing our balcony is getting greener and prettier by the day. The zucchini look like they mean business this year and the raspberries will be ready soon.
But the strawberries are already here and they are delicious.

I am always planning on freezing them to make jam or something, but then they look so tempting that I just eat them all up, plain with a little sugar.
Just perfect after a day at work, coming home, cuddling the cats and eating fresh strawberries.

I already have my weekend planned out full, with a photoshoot tomorrow and a show to see after, but I’ll try to take pics of the things on my to-blog-list, in the hope they’ll make it onto here soon 🙂
Here’s to a delicious, sunshiny weekend!