Success i grew a tomato

ok its tiny, very tiny. but hey its the first one and i have yellow flowers like no ones business at the moment. hopefully i shall soon have so many tomatoes that i will give them away to neighbours and make new friends.


incidentally while watering tomatoes this morning i looked down to see a man of asian descent looking up at my plants. he pointed to the plants and gave me a thumbs up. i said hello and was talking about the plants when he smiled and said "no engrish". ah well at least he liked my garden.

"cookies taste better in shapes"

in the grand tradition, and because i wanted cookies, i made a batch of my no chill sugar cookies. turns out i had forgotten all my cookie cutters; blaise is still confused on how that one happened.

so i purchased a rather functional but scalloped circle set, simple yet efficient. i was making lots of cookies when my official taster walked out of the office to perform his role.

he munched quietly on the still warm sugar cookie and said "its good but cookies just taste better in shapes". well i was off school, had a morning to kill and a desire to make blaise happy. with a paring knife and a toothpick and a laptop for visuals i made "shaped" cookies.

baby steps to bento

so bento in simplest terms is a japanese box lunch made up of a variety of foods, usually involving a base of rice and some veggies, pickles and meat. they can be simple like an everyday lunch or they can be over the top in design and complexity.

well i have to start somewhere so i figured Onigiri and one-day pickles might be a good start.

Onigiri are the rice ball, made hot out of the rice cooker, shaped with salted hands and having (usually) a filling. Things i learned from this first onigiri: rice out of rice cooker extremely freaking hot, when doing filling for onigiri it is not necessary to prep an entire can of tuna. they do look the right shape though, i even got the seaweed hand holder on there.

The pickles were also an experiment, i took the recipe from here http://www.justhungry.com/sweet-and-sour-cucumber-and-wakame-pickles
i didn't have one of the types of seaweed and i used chili powder in place of a whole chili pepper.
i left them over night in the fridge and ... they're really good!! they only last a week, two tops but they won't be around that long.

so bento baby steps was a success.

yummy salads

The plants...they won't stop growing. i expected growth, the climate alone would support that. and the lettuce i expected quite a lot of lettuce. i was right on that count; we've had 2 delicious salads so far and the lettuce keep growing. i'm just harvesting the outer parts and letting the middles keep growing.

The herbs are doing great too, lots of leaves. but man the tomatoes...
ok so back home before we moved i had planted a dozen heritage tomatoe plants but we had a really wet summer and they never grew well. we had lots of green tomatoes by the time we left but nothing ripened (i'm sure the new owner of our house is quite pleased though). i forgot how fast tomatoe plants grow given the right conditions. take a look at my plants. we are at 4 weeks for some of them and 3 weeks for the others. i'm a little worried about lack of bees being on a balcony, i think i'll have to look up how to hand pollinate the yellow flowers that are showing up.




look at my corriander

i love the climate

so let me say this. i was worried about the amount of sun we might get. when i started planting i was convinced that growth would be really really slow. turns out we must be on a good angle for the sun.

the tomatoes are obviously getting bigger. i can look at them at the end of each day and see new growth. the lettuce is expanding monstrously and the herbs are doing great too. everything is growing like mad.

check out my garden. ^^bb

planting round 2

so after a rather awesome day relieving i came home in such a good mood that i was determined to finish up my planting.

i had more juice containers for the last of the coriander and more lettuce (for lettuce you need a 1.5L pot per plant so the 3L juice containers here are amazing). i wanted to move those roma tomatoes to the 18L containers and i wanted to get as many of the remaining tomatoes into containers.

so back to the drainage holes, washing rocks, filling pots with dirt. did all my transfers, planted new ones, watered everything, etc. now i'm really packed full on containers onto the balcony. i'm going to see if i can't find a cheap table for our office that is the height of the window. i think i'd like to put a lot of the herbs on the table so that i can give the tomatoes more access to the sun. right now i have to organize by height (shortest near front) but that means my tomatoes in the back get less sun because of the way the sun moves around here. but they're all growing so it seems to be good so far.

what do the bus drivers think of Canadians?

so i ran out of dirt. and i was annoyed because i had just made the score of my gardening career. we were walking downtown a few days ago and we passed a rather large organic store. out front in a cart were a pile of large containers, 18.9L containers, that had once held chickpeas but were now empty.

i said to blaise "i wonder if we can take those" and when i ran in and asked the answer was a resounding "yes". they were putting out their empty containers for people like me who wanted containers for growing tomatoes. i scored 4 of them and they were sitting at home (with a fresh batch of rocks from Lyall bay) empty. my other plants were starting to get droopy, they needed to be planted soon and i wanted to transfer the two romas out of the smaller pots and put them into these larger ones.
but i was missing something critical...dirt.

so today while blaise was working i got up and got myself a bus day pass and headed back to the nursery to get more dirt. now last time blaise and i did this we ended up taking a cab back because we didn't know how to get home by bus. this time i had checked my route. i would take the 44 to get there but it only came by once an hour. but down the street i could pick up the 2 which would get me to Kilbirnie shops which i could transfer to a 3 which would take me home.

so i bought my first 40L bag and headed to the bus stop. for a distance of 2 blocks it was surprising on how heavy and freaking awkward the thing was. but i got my bus, hopped on, got a strange look from the driver and headed home. thankfully it was early and blaise had another hour of work so i figured i'd go get a 2nd load.

well first off i hit the same driver on the 44 who looked at me funny but didn't say anything. got another 40L bag of dirt and headed down to the 2. however by this point in the day there was a lot more people out and about. i walked onto the bus carrying my bag in a sort of "carrying a sleeping toddler" hold and there was giggles from all over the bus. the driver had the biggest grin on and said "well thats a new one"

hey i have no car!

kilbirnie transfer was just as bad, i swear they had radioed ahead "crazy lady carrying dirt". the driver there just kept snickering as i shifted my bag around on my lap trying to prevent my legs from falling asleep. but got the 2nd bag home. 80L of dirt...that outta do me.