ance

It’s been more than a week that we are back home and for my surprise tomato plants did wait for me and had grown so big that I had to get rid of some 6 or 7 plants to give space to others. Of course part of other more sensitive plants like broccoli and few summer flowers that I replanted too soon just before leaving for Latvia didn’t survive. It’s good time to saw more seeds now, but the weather is so boringly depressive in Iceland right now that I’m in no mood to do anything, and I don’t even follow much what’s happening with summer flowers and peas that are trying to survive out on balcony, but I guess they’re doing fine since the frosts are over.

Here are pictures from how it looks inside now.

Tomatoes all over the place:

Sweet peppers:

First fruits appearing:

The slow but strong grower eggplant:

Hibiscus not convincingly but still alive:

Cucumber producing like crazy:

Just before leaving Iceland I managed to take pictures of almost everything worth picturing in my small apartment garden. I’m away for 2 and a half weeks and meanwhile my sister in law is trying to keep those plants alive. I’m easy though if something doesn’t survive my absence. I put everything in one place to ease the work of watering for her, at the same time I realize plants do need more space than this. When I come back I’ll put part of them out on balcony, so tomatoes indoors should get some air then. Let´s just hope they wait for me.

While there’s still a view like this from our balcony…

… some sowing and seedling-watching is going on indoors. I’m not really sure what I’m doing but I surely enjoy it a lot. It’s so exciting and fascinating to watch seeds turning into plants. Here’s some progress:

Five cucumber seedlings…

… are growing huge, and I’m quite sure they’ll need even bigger pots and space for each of them. Little sprouts seen next to cucumbers are radishes.

Here’s one of 3 batches of tomato plants:

Little hibiscus sprout trapped in its seed coat:

I used some ninja tactics and helped hibiscus to get rid of seed coat to let him grow on:

And grow it does and I’ll cherish it because it’s the only one that came out of 7 seeds.

First eggplant seedlings appear just now:

And here’s just the only real fail so far – herb mix. I have no idea what exactly there is but it’s not growing well:

I also have some paprika seedlings appearing these days, and then there are some onions I planted and quite a lot of summer flowers and broccoli I sowed that are not showing yet, so just mentioning.

I thought it would be fun to let Sandra ”help” me with sowing and all the other gardening work this year, but we didn’t get far to start with. She helped though to fill some pots. That is before she realized it was great fun to throw mold up in the air and make a mold rain in living room. Oh, no no.

But I’m really looking forward on gardening this year. There will be some stress and fear around the end of April when I’m leaving for Latvia for 2 weeks and I’ve yet to get someone to come and water my plants, but in a worst case I’ve saved some seeds for sowing only after I come back, so even if things go wrong with existing plants, I’ll still have chance to make some fruits this summer.

I realized that I never put any progress pictures of last summer’s biggest thing – fixing our balcony. When I just searched for some pictures I remembered all the noise and dust and trouble and men walking with their dusty shoes in our apartment and all that hell that I had already forgotten about but it sure was no fun living with it for almost a half year and having small kids around. Here is some of it in pictures.

Balcony after high-pressure wash when all the loose old paint came off like some autumn leaves:

High-pressure wash of course made some mini flooding:

Then a guy who was breaking down even more paint and cement from balcony ceiling with a terribly noisy weapon crashed some of the stuff in a window in girls bedroom. No worries – nobody got hurt and all the windows were about to be changed anyway:

Some more dust and crap:

I don’t have a good picture of already finished new balcony with red colored pieces instead of old ugly blue. Right now it would be pointless to go out and take a picture because balcony is dirty with ash that was brought up from inlands with the latest storm and will probably bother me for some time… yeah, I’m talking about the volcanic ash that people in world have forgotten about, we here still live with it. But I made a nice picture during recent snowstorm that changed our balcony on 5th floor into cute Christmas land… that’s our Christmas tree, doing fine in its pot:

Last Saturday I did some clean-up on balcony and was happy to dig a shovel in a compost bin that I started 1,5 years ago, all winters food scraps was mixed with papers, old plants and some mold and today it looks like this – nicely dark and fairly clear:

We’ve done composting also this winter and when spring is almost here I needed to build new compost container where I move all the nasty food scraps nicely mixed together with papers and mold and leaves, it will not smell and will turn into mold in a year or so. I put it away and let it be:

And the last picture – something beautiful and promising – full of seeds to start soon and I hope some of it when it grows will look great on our new balcony:

At the end of November last year I bought some organic garlic in store and planted them in 2 pots thinking that it wouldn’t end well. I put one of the pots outside on balcony right away but kept the other one inside. The one inside gave few white ugly sprouts weeks later and I thought it was no point in having them in and want them to grow through the darkness of Icelandic winter, so out it went too for a winter sleep. I peeked outside today and was so happy to see things happening. Yay.