My balcony

 

Last night we saw a rainbow from our balcony. A silver lining to living in such a rainy city, if you will.

Little tomatoes are growing in my balcony planter. I hope they ripen before it freezes.

Another summer, another mini-garden

Today I perused Bell's Nursery in South Anchorage to find the perfect plants for my balcony garden. I don't have the space and climate conditions of last summer, so I went a little more conservative with my plant choices. On pot contains five herbs: basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme and mint. The second holds a cherry tomato, chives, a bell pepper and a couple snap pea sprouts. We'll see how they fare with 17.5 hours of daylight (yeah) and some Anchorage rain.

i just heard thunder

I just realized a bit of time has lapsed since my last post. The hot summer weather has kept me outside and busier than usual. And I'm punching a few more hours at my second job lately. Which is good because I think they like me. Minimum wage just went up, so now I'm making a few more pennies at the store.

A storm is rolling in to Boise at the moment and the northeastern sky looks almost black. Here's a couple pictures:
My grape tomato plant is producing:
This is an itty-bitty cabbage start:

three little victories

First, I harvested the first two tomatoes from the grape tomato plant the other day.

Second, the AC repair man visited this morning and fixed the AC. Thank goodness.

Third, I was reading my newspaper while waiting for the AC guy to show up when I see the headline, "Washington appeals court rules against WSU dorm patrols."

Yes, the court ruled that police cannot walk through the halls of dorms, saying students have a certain expectation of privacy in those halls that connect their bathrooms and bedrooms.

"You would think an institution of higher learning would be dedicated to the rule of law," defense lawyer Tim Esser said. "For WSU to think it can rewrite some regulations to get around the Fourth Amendment is bizarre."

Read the story here.

This is a story we covered at the Evergreen and I also wrote about for Washinton State Magazine (which to my chagrin, I cannot find online). It's good to see we weren't shining light on an issue to no avail. I'll be looking forward to seeing how WSU amends it's policy as promised in a news release since the ruling. I'll also be interested to see how the Evergreen follows up on the issue.

green things

Remember those broccoli plants I mentioned in April? Well they grew. Yes, back porch garden has created something!Also, I bought a share from a community garden called Peaceful Belly with a couple friends and got my first batch of vegetables. There's 18 weeks of locally-grown greens coming my way, which should save me some trips to Albertsons and expand my recipe list.

In this week's batch it looks like I got: green onions, spinach, three kinds of lettuce, italian parsley and swiss chard.

Now I have to figure out what to make with swiss chard. The cookbooks my grandmother gave me for Christmas and Easter will come in handy.

Baby carrots.

These are my broccoli plants the gardening columnist at my paper gave me. I asked her if they'd grow in a planter, because I only have a porch at my apartment. She said to give it a try.

But if you look closely you can see the little tufts of green sprouting in the center. Those are my carrots I planted from seeds peaking through the soil. They appeared Saturday. I'm very excited about them. I had to resist the temptation to pull one out and see what an infant carrot looks like.