Monday 5 September 2011

Street Art

One of the reasons why I love living in Sydney's inner west. The sign has been RockEnmore for as long as we have been here (occasionally the council tries to clean it up) but the spider's web was new today.




This graffiti is near the Bourke Street Cafe in Surrey Hills.

Take a closer look at the coral and hair!

August in the Balcony Garden

Matt and I had a day off together - we finally had the chance to work on the veggie planter.
Before
Legs - room for storage boxes underneath - for growing mushrooms and storage

Pond liner


With drainage holes   *see note below

Rocks as a base

Soil (store bought potting mix as the compost from the worm farm is not ready yet)
We slept in, had a lazy brunch then got into it. 15 mins and 3 screws later the battery on the drill was flat.
3 hrs charging later and we were going again. By the time we finished it was dark!

*Note: after the success with my seeding pots I had looked into DIY options to make the planter also self watering - most involved specialised equipment (= very expensive) and/or large water reservoir (= weight on the balcony) . That very night after we had finished the day's work, while looking for something else, I stumbled across these instructions:
I may in the future empty the planter and set up this or something similar (shh... don't tell Matt, yet).

The next day I finished cleaning up and did a bit of pottering including a reorganisation of the overall layout. Later that day I was hanging out the washing and thinking, even without plants in the planter, how much nicer it was on the balcony. I could feel the microclimate developing already, when... something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye...

Beneficial bugs (or at least I hope so!)