tomato | little home by hand

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.

The peppers are coming in and the salad is thriving in all this rain.

We picked each and every tomato that was ready and are still amazed at our bountiful harvest.

I have to say our gardening went great but we failed with cooking (again). We left all those tomatoes to ripen until we had so many of them that we couldn’t eat them all. So we made tomato cream soup with basil and parmesan chips, which turned out to be one easy way to a delicious meal! We even had a generous portion left to freeze.

The lone first pepper went into a small side salad with feta cheese. Easy and yummy.
I think working on our cooking skills will be a winter project.
On to something else completely: Our apartment hunting is really stressing us out. We saw a lovely apartment on thursday and sent in our details to the agent. They had us as their first choice but pressured us to make the decision right away, hand them over a lot of money cash pretty much right away and move in next week – no negotiation. We had some hectic talks with our landlady who was very understanding and we initially said yes, though feeling completely overwhelmed. But after sitting down and hectically weighing the pros and cons and looking at the map we found out that the nicely sized balcony was not in fact facing southwest (as indicated in the offer) but northwest! Add that the rest of the apartment was facing north and my priority of having sunlit rooms and a balcony to grow food went out the window. So we called everyone again and cancelled and just went to bed, pretty much drained emotionally and physically.
Boy will I be glad to have this search be over. Finding a nice, affordable place that meets our criteria is proving to be quite the challenge.