Mid-Winter Update

I wanted to share the 2 only really exciting things that are happening at the moment. Everything on the balcony is dead and it looks very desolate and unloved out there. I keep putting off the task of clearing it up but it will have to happen soon as we are moving house in a month. Inside there's still a little bit of life. My late starting yellow peppers still seem very happy - they have produced an incredible amount of flowers and some peppers. I should have trimmed back the growth as I have a very large flowery plant and just a few inch-long mini peppers :)

Plus for the first time this year our basil has flowered and it's lovely.

I've been enjoying the mild weather although things seem to be turning colder now. I love a really cold sunny day like today.

Zombie beans

My beans have risen from the dead! Lucky I didn't clear them out yet!

To bee, or not to bee

My pollination attempts began a while ago with the chillies, due to the fact that my house is rather lacking in both wind and bees. So I've been helping my chillies "get it on" by moving the pollen around the flowers on the plant with my finger. It seems to be working well as there are loads of fruits forming. Sometimes I must miss one because occasionally the whole flower and it's stem just drop off.

This chilli's seen some action

I hadn't been worrying about the plants outside because I presumed that they could sort this kind of thing out for themselves. Although I haven't seen any bees (do bees get vertigo do you think?) we certainly have plenty of wind. Most of plants seem to be happy - there are tomatoes and peas forming and I haven't had a hand in that, so some magic must be happening on it's own: 

 

But recently my runner bean flowers have been falling off and after a bit of googling I think that they might need some manual intervention. The last 2 nights I have been out with my paintbrush to transfer the pollen around and between the flowers, although I'm slightly hampered by the fact that I don't know my anthers from my stigmas and it isn't as obvious as it is with the chillies.

Hopefully this is what they were after. Once again my plants are educating and amazing me.

More flowers and other happenings

There are some amazing things happening on my balcony. Here's a couple more flowers you haven't seen yet...

Runner Beans

Tomatoes

Lavender

Look at my pea plants - I find this incredible. It's reaching out to grab onto anything it can, and it's growing up the net nicely. Things like this always brings me back to the question "how do they know how to do this?" I am really enjoying seeing this stuff happen on a daily basis.

This is the most exciting news though, there are real, actual, proper chillies and tomatoes growing. Look!

Note to self: stop taking so many close up photos on new camera, remember to get the bigger picture too!

First flowers

There's the very beginnings of some flowers on a lot of my plants, I think over the next week or so I'm going to bore you with lots of pretty pictures. My tomatoes are about 50cm high, and they have started making some buds:

My beans kept growing and growing even past the netting and into the sky. The first one I chopped down is ahead of the rest - it really has put it's energy into the lower leaves. Look what I spotted today:

The top of the chilli plants are looking promising:

And here's the best for last, my first proper flower on the jalapeno plant :)

Herbs

On a more positive note, I've got some great 3 part pots for herbs. I've filled my first one with chives, mint and what I hope is lemonbalm, all stolen (with permission) from Mum's garden. I've kept the mint in a separate pot as I heard it is prone to overtaking everything, although saying that I think lemonbalm is related to mint so maybe that should have had the same treatement....oh well we'll see!

I always loved lemonbalm in our garden at home, it's got such an amazing smell. I don't know what I can use it for but I can't wait till it gets big enough to smell nice. I'll try to find some nice recipies to use it in.

Mint is a classic....we are big fans of mojitos here so this was a have-to-have. It seems to have bedded in really well. It's such an amazing green colour.

And chives....it's hard to take a pretty picture of chives apart from the gorgeous flowers (especially when they are half eaten like ours), but let's remember it's not all about looking beautiful - you can't beat chives and mayo with your potato salad.

New Camera!

My very lovely parents have bought me a shiny new camera for my birthday :) My last camera was a very old Canon Ixus 4.0, and I've upgraded to the Canon Ixus 115 - 12 megapixles, HD, wide angle 4x zoom. Check me out! I'm looking forward to doing a bit of photography alongside the growing.

Here's my first offering