Gardening on a Balcony in the middle of the city...

So my flatmates and I decided we should make a container garden on our balcony to grow our own foods and be a little green in the process.

I brought 4 pots from the local Asian shop it's called Japan City. It's down on Cuba Street. Pretty neat shop with plenty of plastic containers, Asian foods, washing liquids, cloths, knick-knacks and other bits and bobs.

The containers were $4.50 each.

I brought/ saved seeds for a while. I had carrot seeds, lettuce seeds, radish seeds, tomato seeds, silver-beet and rainbow-beet seeds. As well as two packets of marigold seeds. I recently brought a limp looking aloe vera plant. These all got planted into seed raising mix in the pots.

Some of the seeds I am afraid may have gotten rotten as I was too excited when I planted the seeds and over watered some parts.

Luckily they seem to be starting to grow. (Excitement!)

Here are some pictures of how it's coming along.

There's a glass side to the balcony above the plants, don't worry it's not nothing there! 

Radishes...

 Aloe Vera plant with some Marigold flowers...

(baby lettuce)

Over all I think they're growing nicely. I'll have to separate some of them out a bit in a while as they're closely packed together. May have to buy another pot. But on the whole I'm happy with how it looks. 

I also made a 'watering device' as I didn't want to have to buy one and it's also recycling (go me, being a little green)... it's an old pasta sauce jar which has had cool water added and then the lid has been punched with a nail so the water can drip out of it. Nifty! 

In 2 weeks we are having our flat warming (we moved in, in the middle of January) so it's not too long since we moved here. It's given us time to settle in and work out what we need. And giving us time to get rid of excess clutter!  Not sure how I will get rid of the "TradeMe" pile before the party though. - Have a steady flow of listings on my account so hopefully more items will sell and they will go that way. 

Huge update needed.

Looks like I haven't been on here in 9 days! Today it's Friday night, so I'd better catch you up...
I have been very busy offline as well as online- reading blogs and looking at Pinterest.

I found an awesome blog from a guy named Daniel who lives in the USA, he blogs about his apartment and life.  His blog is here; http://manhattan-nest.com
He's a pretty awesome guy - he does his own DIY and is sprucing the place up, one post at a time.
He has inspired me to learn some more electrical work stuff so I can rewire things -- not major things, things like a lamp for a desk. ;)

Last weekend I stood on a piece of plastic which went through my jandal into my left heel. (Ouch). No image. It was pretty sore. I've hurt both feet from limping for 3 days. :(

Yesterday I went for a 10km long walk, all through town, up to the university... It made me super tired.

Today (finally) the Borax was picked up from the courier (by me), so I can 1. kill fleas with it by putting it on the carpet and 2. use it to make laundry powder. :)

We also had 9kg of fruit delivered to us for a deal I found online. There's a local site in NZ called Treat Me, it's run through Trade Me (local auction site). They featured a deal for 9kg of fruits for $25. (Deal, plus it's delivered). So today after it was delivered, I made an apple & peach pie. Pie crust was brought, but the fruit I sliced, diced and peeled myself. It looks pretty darn delicious if I say so myself. It's currently in the fridge just chillin' waiting for the right moment to be devoured.

 The fruit, apples, pears, plums, peaches and oranges... 

Stewed apples and peaches with a little added sugar.

                                                     
                                                                 Apple & Peach pie.

Pie again...

Apple & peaches ready to be stewed.

Apples & peaches ready to be stewed...

Dinner, hot chips... and all that fruit. 

Tonight my flatmate came home after work with a mutual friend and asked Dan and I if we'd like to join them for 2-for-1 cocktails down at Good Luck Bar.... How could we refuse?
Sadly when we arrived we found we were about 20 minutes too late for the deal. Regardless we decided to each grab a drink anyway. While we were drinking and talking we hatched a plan to make our own cocktails...
So of course, we're going to be arranging a Cocktails and Eating delicious home baking Night for one night soon. So with that in mind, I decided to make use of the fresh fruit we had arrive this afternoon and make up a recipe for Pear Muffins.
(Truth be told, I followed a muffin recipe, it just didn't have any pears in sight!)

Sadly I don't have any images of the before or during process. The muffins are currently sitting on the bench 'chilling' under a clean tea-towel overnight. There's 20 of them now. We had to taste-test two of them. ;) (Hey there is 4 of us here at the moment).
**Note to self: Next time add more flavour to the mixture like coconut or vanilla essence.

All in all a pretty successful day albeit a long one!

Tomorrow better be much more relaxing, although I expect a courier to come and wake me up for another parcel.

Green Chicken Curry and sunburn

Yesterday I decided I'd make Green Curry for dinner, of course it's just the yummiest when it's a delicious meaty one. So I went with chicken. (Best meaty thing in the freezer).

Here's the curry as it's cooking,

I walked to the post shop today to collect my parcel, didn't realise they only open in the mornings at that one. So I arrived at 1:30pm and they'd closed at noon. Grr, I'm going to have to try again tomorrow. 

Sounds like I will be working two nights each week with the ESOL kids. (Yay). So I'll be working more and studying more. I'm down to one paper now, so hopefully I can pass this term with flying colours.

Earlier in the week I got pretty badly sunburned at lunchtime. I went to meet Dan on Tuesday and got sunburned all along the top of my back and neck. Ouch. Luckily I've had heaps of aloe-vera gel around so it hasn't blistered. 

Because of the heat, I've been wearing extra clothes over it whenever I need to go out into the sun, which makes it hot and itchy. (Oh the things we do to stop getting more injured!)

This weekend is the Hertz Wellington Sevens. 

A crazy, booze-fuelled weekend complete with rugby watching fans who're all dressed in insane costumes.

I'm trying to avoid it, so instead we're having people come over for a dinner tomorrow night. 

Flatmate's girlfriend is going to be cooking for 8 people. (Not quite the 9 we've had to cook a nights dinner for so far!)