Glimpse at unit living

I wanted to show some pictures of where I live and the small steps we've taken so far on my journey to self sufficiency and living simply -

Tahitian lime, dwarf lemon and cherry tomato plants all growing pretty well on one of the balconies. The lemon tree I got from my sister as a gift and it has been attacked by a myriad of bugs but it's doing much better now since I gave it some much needed TLC and now two little fruits have appeared! I'm so excited!

Check out those baby lemons, aren't they so cute! Let's hope they make it through the winter.

This is my other balcony - it's about 1 x 1metre! That's it! But I have bush tomato (mening we just found the plant on my partner's property in the bush) on the left, tomato and basil in the centre and lettuce on the right.

Hanging basket hanging from that balcony roof above the tomato, basil and lettuce has more lettuce

And another hanging basket with a strawberry plant

This is a side shot of that balcony to show how small it is! So that's it for my outside growing area. Although I have been considering using the neighbours roof! You can just see a bit of the purple roof in that top picture. I have access to their roof from my bathroom window. Hmm not sure what they'll think of that!

This is a picture of our little library containing very simple and frugal recreational activities - plenty of fiction and non-fiction books (including gardening, sewing and baking topics of course!) and in the bottom right hand corner a bunch of second hand board games we picked up. We barely watch TV and would rather spend our time more productively.

Lyndon in the kitchen cooking up a (vegetarian) storm! It's such a tiny kitchen but we make do cooking, canning and baking. In this picture you can see one of Lyndon's charcoal pieces of art behind his head. His first love is art (after me of course!) and spent years studying it in Houston and Chicago (he was born in Aus then moved to the States with his parents when he was 14, only moving back to Australia a few months before he met me). He is looking forard to having more time to create art when we move to our dream country homestead hopefully within a few years.On the bench behind him you can see a few jars of my latest jam. My worst so far, but that's another post! Then on the windowsill above the sink you can just see a few black pots - we have planted some cumquat seeds, passionfruit seeds and an advocado seed to see if they shoot. It would be great to get as many fruits started in pots while we live here then transplant them into gardens when we have our property because they take so long to bear fruit. The sooner we start growing them the better!

One of our frugal heat saving measures! It's just a towel rolled up to act as a draught stopper. I will be sewing some proper draught snakes at my mum's this weekend to replace these, but they work just as well in the chilly few days we've had recently.

We use these Soapnuts instead of laundry liquid. I was quite skeptical at first but they work reall well! The Soapnuts are the casings of the berries from the Chinese soapberry tree. You can find out more information or order them from here.

Any finally, one of those frugal recreational activities after our yummy dinner, a board game. This one is trionomoes and we abandoned it when we saw there was a lot of adding up required. We instead played Kingston and I am happy to report I WON! Hehehe 4 out of 4 games so far! Come on Lyndon, give me a challenge!

I hope you liked my photo post. Pictures tell a thousand words, so I hope you learnt a bit more about me rather than if I just wrote a really long post.

Good night!

Kim