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!

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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)

it’s not what it looks like…

Not a particularly good liar, that cat.

june days

I am SO hooked on making videos…I just can’t seem to stop.

We’ve had some lovely sunny days here which I’ve tried hard to enjoy. Between my pollen allergy and a LOT of work it hasn’t always been easy. Sneeze.
In addition to some really tough days at the office (which unfortunately will continue all month) I’ve been quite busy with my photography as well, which is great of course and I am enjoying myself immensely doing photoshoots. So far I’ve been blessed with the sweetest clients imaginable and I hope I’ll be able to share the results pretty soon!
At this point I just have to mention this speech I listened to the other day. Do yourselves a favor and sit down with a cup of tea or lemonade, depending on your weather, watch this and be inspired. Preferably after you’ve read this post to the end that is 🙂

I’m trying to soak up this time of year at the barn, when the wind is still fresh and the grass is lush and green, before the flies and the heat. Sneeze. I also gave in today and started taking pills against my allergy.
I then rode the pony bareback through the woods without a single sneeze. Heaven.
My balcony garden is coming along nicely as well. I got flowers in addition to edibles this year and they look lovely in their pots next to the herbs and mints. Which reminds me, I just bought a fourth type of mint. Ginger mint. How could I resist?

The kohlrabis are getting chubbier.

I took out the sukkulents to soak up some sun too, then had to take them inside again because they got burned and turned red! Now they’re back to green and doing great thankfully.

The sunniest corner is occupied by the tomatoes and peppers, along with a little mint and yet more flowers tucked in here and there.


I was given some soil to use from a friend and mixed it with storebought soil. I seems to have come from a garden, because these have been growing in between my plants:

Aren’t they cute? The seeds must have been dormant in the soil. Anyone know their name in english?
The wild strawberries are producing like crazy.

I love the unique taste of wild strawberries. The greatest weekend breakfast!

I also finally got some green things for our bare window sills inside. It’s amazing how a little bit of green can cheer a room up so much.

The cats love them too. Unfortunately this means they’re busy nibbling away at them. Good thing I took care only to buy plants that are non-toxic for cats and so far, the addition to their diet doesn’t seem to be doing any harm.
They do love our new rug as well…I’m predicting the plants are tougher than the rug and will last longer. Good thing too because the rug only cost me 3€ at the thrift store 🙂 Slowly but surely this new place of ours is getting cozy!

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.

carnival weekend

Except the boyfriend and I don’t do carnival and chose to hunker down at home for the long weekend instead. Fine with the cats too.

The boyfriend got a new stereo system this week and I’ve been playing my old records on it (I did insist he get one where the record player can be plugged in. Apparently most new stereos don’t have that plug anymore! Seriously, people don’t know what they’re missing). My taste in music seems to be pretty far off the beaten track though…I tried to find a youtube video to share my current favorite, “Winds of the Old Days” by Joan Baez, but there isn’t one.
You can listen to a preview on Amazon though (Song 9).
Apart from that, a little sewing, a photoshoot and a new shelf in our southfacing window (yes, I do know the window needs cleaning desperately).

The seed starting box came out this weekend and got cleaned and set up. The first seeds for the garden are in their little starting pots and waiting to sprout.
By the way, I updated my Blog Roll after planning to do so for about a year so have a look to the right 🙂

mornings

We’ve been having temperatures below -10°C for a week now and I’m a bit worried about the mints and strawberries and other plants on my balcony.
On the other hand, the weather has provided some stunning sunrises.

I get up early at the weekend as well (as in “way before sunrise”-early) to do some research and work (more on that very soon!) and I love to watch the sky and the room grow light and the colors changing.

My seeds have arrived this week and I can’t wait to get some started! I brought in some mint cuttings during christmas and surprisingly it’s thriving inside, having grown from bare root and two leaves to this:

Which means that I’ll have mint this year even if the outdoor plants don’t make it. This is a peppermint from the south of Italy, which a friend gave me and which smells heavenly in summer, so I would have hated to lose it.

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 😉

playing with texture (freebie!)

I love adding texture to photos, but I try not to overdo it and often I have a lot of fun playing around with textures but still end up liking the picture best without it. I think the key is to choose the right one(s) and keep it subtle. I thought I’d share with you my pictures from yesterday with a very distinctive, very un-subtle texture to it.
I am still thoroughly enjoying Project 365. Yesterday was a lovely sunny day and I took my camera with me to the barn. I wandered around a bit aimlessly and found these. Every creature was bathing in the sun on the first warm day of the year, horses on the paddocks with their eyes closed, cats on roofs and even these flowers were stretching and turning their heads towards the sun.

I use my own images for texture, mostly painted walls, cracked stone flooring, rusty surfaces…I am always on the lookout and constantly add to my texture folder. I found this on top of some barrels standing around (waiting for rodeo season):

Love this texture and want to use it? Leave a comment to let me know (make sure I’ve got your email address) and I’ll send it to you full size by email!
One more textured picture. To take this I pulled over on the way home, lots of space waiting for the horses to claim it for the summer: