Pickles

Bread and butter pickles. The next picture is dill. I spent Saturday making pickles. I also made tomato sauce and jarred it. Though I realized when I tasted what remained in the pot, that I forgot to salt it. This is probably not such a huge problem since I can salt it when I make whatever it is I will make with it but one of the jars didn't seal so I reopened them, salted it and reprocessed the jars. A nice way to kill a lovely sunny day.

After spending the day in the hot sweaty kitchen of my condo I then went to the 40th high school class reunion of the seminary from which I did not graduate but only attended for a year and a half. I am not connected to these men and they seem very connected, even after all these years. Only one priest showed up, though I somehow have remained friendly with him, the rest are just shadows of people I used to know.

Four Collages

Something I have always wanted to make. Collages. I can't think what possessed me to sit down and start except that I had a lot of junk I'd saved, like the little paper tags they put on your laundered shirts and pieces of tickets and other ephemera that interests me. I have a lot of prayer books I plan to cannibalize.

Morning not glorious

This is my morning glory. It has twined nicely up around my light but there is little hope it will bloom anytime soon. Like my tomatoes which will most likely not turn red, the morning glories have pin-head sized blooms which are not getting bigger and will disappoint me. At least I can turn the green tomatoes into pickles.

Balcony wildlife

This is the home of my pet spider, Edmund.

Balcony garden

This is the south end of my little garden. Bay laurel which stay out until December and then tolerate the indoors for a few months before I put them back where they belong. When I put them out, the house seems empty, when I bring them in, it is cram packed. There is also some basil, a queen of the night, impatiens, some of which has volunteered in my christmas cactus. And there is my sweet opuntia.

This is my feverfew. I love it. It has been a constant companion no matter where I lived for almost 20 years.

Gardening in tiny spaces.

This is the north end of my garden. In this mess of plants are tomatoes, cucumbers, sage, thyme, basil (way too much to ever eat), rosemary, feverfew, kenilworth ivy, sunbeam coreopsis, morning glories, some sort of salvia which was supposed to bloom red but didn't, petunias and a few other things whose names I can't recall. a lot of this is just stuff that comes back year after year. I've had the feverfew and kenilworth ivy for more than 20 years, moving it accidently from place to place (well, 3 places). The coreopsis snuck in there about 10 years ago. I had the most lovely wild morning glories for years but they abandoned me. I feel bad about that. The thyme is perennial. It doesn't seem to mind staying on the balcony all winter. The sage is new this year. The rosemary comes inside in December and tolerates the heat and dryness of my condo until I put it back out in April. It usually has some sort of pest issue. Scale, mites, mildew, I give it a shower every few weeks.

Key lime Pie

Key limes are not easy to find if you are not a restaurant. I had to use bottled stuff with an additional kick from a regular lime. It has been almost 8 months since I made one. And I made about 4 zillion of them but I could not, for the life of me, remember what the hell was in them.