by The Art Bug: What's Up Wednesday

Life...

I have been keeping myself busy with some gardening lately. It is also a great stress buster for me.

Even though I love gardening but I don't have quite a green thumb but I NEVER stop trying!

After living for about 2 years in Singapore in a closed high floor apartment, when we moved to this new low floor Condo a few months back, the most exciting part for me was this tiny narrow balcony (quite an Ugly space then) where I had imagined a little 'Green paradise' of my own...

BEFORE...

AFTER...

Some of these are already gone :(

The first step was to get a patch of artificial grass, I would have loved natural one but since it is a rented place we don't have that scope, after that we got these grey patio tiles from Ikea to finish the base, both of these were quite reasonable.

In the previous apartment we had the high table so we got these bar stools from Ikea but here in new house we got a new low normal table (so much more comfortable)...

Anyways so we had no use for these bar stools anymore, so we got its legs cut and I also did some DIY on them and we had two 'Garden Chairs', the narrow and sleek bar stool design was perfect for our little space!

Also covered the Air con thing door with this Bamboo screen to hide the ugly stuff, and make a nice backdrop for some vertical gardening...

Look who stopped by to say Hello...

...Yellow Sunbird

It has been a process, I decided to do some organic gardening, so I got, Organic planting soil, some seeds, tools, and used some recycled milk cans and glass jars to start my garden.

I planted quite a few seeds like herbs, tomatoes etc suitable for a small space, as the seedlings grew, about 90% of them came up, BUT, we had a pest problem, we had no idea as it was a new home, anyways it had to be done, and I had to discard all the Edible plants.

Then I started second round of sowing everything again, the seedlings came up almost 80% and we had another problem this time with Garden bugs, so all of the seedlings died again!!

.....Phew, but I tried third time and at least some of them survived YAY!!!!!!!

Hot Pepper...

Cherry Tomatoes...

Only herb grown from seeds that has survived so far,

Sweet Basil...

I even used a few leaves in Salad...Yummy!

My mint came up at first but it grows really slow, and anyways mine died eventually, so I tried this new method (will let you know in detail later) and it going on good (so far, keeping my fingers crossed),

Mint...