Oh, the difference in having proper equipment! We paid out like suckers – went to the garden shop and parted with over a hundred bucks for four feet of spring-time sanity: a Jump Start Grow Light. (Only $60 at U.S. Amazon? What the HELL, Canada). Boom time? Oh, I think so. It has a pulley system, [...]
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Can we even stand the wait for warmth? I’ve been cautioned off putting too much effort into the balcony, but moderation is short-hand for wasted enthusiasm. Despite preference for muddy boots over patent leather, and obscene, gluttonous love of rhubarb… our balcony has a big job to do. Occupy my twiddling green-ish thumbs until this: Source: The Telegraph It’s one [...]
[Part 2 of 2. Previous post: revisiting last summer's balcony garden + full plant list]. I’d made wild and determined promises about growing the most gorgeous balcony garden last summer. It wasn’t. Certainly I loved it, but it wasn’t categorically Best In Show. Learned? A lot. Growing from seed: we grew 18 things on the balcony plant list [...]
Little bastards. I’d done my homework – in a big, sick, OCD-way. All winter I’d read stacks of books on gardening – making sure I’d better know my way around the garden centre come spring time. Finally I could stray from impatiens… petunias… geraniums. I’d skulk around the plant nursery on a May long weekend: [...]
Ever try to bend nature to your will? And how does that usually work out? Uh huh. Last spring, with uncharacteristic greed, we bought 2 kilos of seed potatoes – half Russet, half Yukon Gold.. That’s a lot of potatoes, far more than our little community plot could handle. To address the excess, I thought [...]
After a winter couped-up inside, I was dying inside for some greenery. Plants to love and care for. If we couldn’t have a green wall… then what? The previous year, while still living at The Cave, we’d bought five little ivy plants (my “fivies”). I’d had big hopes for them – but it turns out [...]
Woolly Pockets had my attention. What was it these guys had done so well? Their photos? The happy sunshine & bright, bright paint? Maybe the biggest, baddest, Jurassic Parkiest plants shouting how glad they were to be alive. Me, you, the universe… we couldn’t get enough of these things. WoollyFever! Crashing slightly back to earth [...]
More obscene than Usher’s tour bus, more imposing than a freight train. You don’t expect to wake up and see a double decker bus on your balcony. How did it get there? Well, we kinda sorta built it. Going crazy with pre-spring fever, I was hatching all sorts of ideas for potting benches and green [...]
Despite frosty appearances, it’s not winter anymore. It’s pre-spring. There’s proof outside my bedroom window where the tiny bulbs we planted last autumn are now 6” tall – and one particularly ambitious crocus is about to bloom. Excitement in the universe. Paolo & I are the most adorable little gardeners on earth. We’re definitely still [...]
Does this photo strike you as odd? Look at the towels on the bathroom stool. Angled just so. An entire apartment staged within an inch of its life and then… that. A forgotten patio undeserving of even soapy water and a scrub brush. Such a contrast to the interiors. Who cares? The place sold. Yet blank balconies [...]
