Balcony Pt. 2!!!

I just got my first celebrity blog comment! It was from Cecilia of Balcony Garden Dreaming who does a great blog about many good things, but in particular about gardening in limited urban spaces. It's where I first heard the term "edge gardening" which sounds so cool and post-modern, and it has been particularly inspiring to me in our present locale, so it was very nice to get a word from her! You can check out her site here:

http://balconyofdreams.blogspot.com/

I'm sure that I'm not the first person to mention this, but it is true that one of the cool things about the blogosphere (a word so ugly that I kind of dig it) is that you can actually communicate at times with people whose work you admire. Thanks Cecilia!

Apropos of this, here's an update on our own balcony garden of dreams -

One of our experiments this year was with jasmine in wooden containers. It seems to be going pretty well so far. They made some headway in covering up the ugly railing during the spring
and are now putting their enery into flowering. They're very pretty, and are starting to give off that amazing scent at night!

We're glad that the jasmine seem to like all of the sun out there. Unfortunately, the roses don't seem quite as pleased with it all. We're pretty clueless with roses (they seem to be one of the more temperamental plants), but they're hanging in there, and there are even some new buds. They do seem a little grim at times, but Em did a good job on the aphids, so we're cautiously optimistic.

The sun is great for the herbs though, and the rosemary, thyme, basil, and mint are thriving! This bodes well for our cooking, and as spring heads into summer (and the apartment gets hot) we're starting to look forward to dinner out there among the greenery and wonderful scents. It's so nice to see all of that work paying off!! Thanks especially to Em for a bunch of help with the garden, but particularly for endless dirt carrying : ) Hey, as I write this, there's a hummingbird out there checking out the jasmine - darn, it's hard to get a good picture of those guys - can you see him?

And behind it all, the big old morning glory and the bougainvilla are doing their groovy thing!

As a bonus, here are some cute pictures of Finn swimming with Hanna and her mom Kei last weekend. Hanna is Finn's good friend from school, and we hope she can come swimming more often : ) Man, are we happy to have the pool as it gets hot!

Going to see the Dead tonight!! Keep your snarky comments to yourselves - I'm excited!!