This week I've been looking at the photos from my balcony garden that are about two weeks old. It is amazing to see how quickly the plants grow and how much they change in such a short period of time.
I have already harvested our very fist cherry tomato! It's been a big happening for us, so I'll show it to you from two different orientations of our balcony 馃檪
Right now, we have 50 shades of red growing on our tomato plants. Luckily, they can be stored for a long time, so hopefully next week I will be able to prepare some bruschetta with our own cherry tomatoes (for now I have only picked that one 馃檪)! My husband doesn't spend so much time taking care of them and he is always taking tons of photos when he comes once a week and sees the progress.
These are almost ready! I know that someone would already pick the red ones, but we let them ripen a little bit more on the plant as they are protected against wind and rain, so they can stay there longer.
And those chilli peppers! We have already made plans what to do with them. We have tons of them on the balcony and much more in the garden. It just takes such a long time for them to ripen. They've been like this for a few weeks and they should finally start turning red soon.
We will dry some of them, make Indonesian sambal, put some in olive oil and my husband will simply snack on the rest. Believe it or not, he eats chilli like snacks.
And we also have our first Trinidad Scorpion pepper! I won't even touch those as they are too hot - perfect for my husband.
And this is our surprise pepper. I don't know if it's a red bell pepper or something else, but we can't wait to find out. It looks like sort of a bell pepper for now.
Kohlrabies are almost ready to harvest. I will give them one more week before cooking them.
We planted more salads as it's too hot and we have to eat them quickly because they are bolting. By continuous planting we get as much salad as we need even during the hottest days.
My baby kale plants are almost ready to be planted. We will remove the lettuce from the garden and plant kale for late autumn harvest.
I left our dill to bolt as we had way too much and couldn't eat it fast enough. People say that the herb loses its flavour and becomes sort of woody after bolting, but to me it's not that different and now we can also use those beautiful flowers for more colour in our dishes. I will leave a few flowers to go to seed for next year.
Oregano is flowering too. It has those tiny pink flowers that attract bees. Our balcony is buzzing with life these days.
Our strawberry mint has beautiful fluffy flowers too.
And hyssops flowers are so delicious! They are a bit milder in flavour than the leaves and I love to combine them with many vegetables.
I liked how this plant looked like when it started to bolt, so I let it be. I'm excited to see what kind of flowers it will develop.
This is my favourite part of the year as we can see the fruits of all our hard work. We had some very hot days and some of my herbs on the balcony burned, but this is nature and I enjoy what I can for as long as I can 馃檪
See you next time...