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Now I'm told that once the flower dies away a fruit is left in it's place, and you know what that means - I might actually have a fruiting tomato plant.  

Will wonders never cease?

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from the Chocolate Bunnies!

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For a while I've wanted to have my own compost, to reduce landfill waste and all that good doing-my-bit stuff (really it's because I'm a cheap ass and don't want to put it in my dollar-per-bag trash collection), but living in a highrise apartment I always filed that idea away in the 'not practical' bin.  

Now that I'm back in New Zealand it's a slightly more obtainable goal:   my brother lives 5 minutes away on a houselot, so I figure if it all turns bad I can use his property as my own Area51.  Plus he has lots of cool gardening toys, such as a shredder, which means I can get mulch whenever I ask nicely.  Plus, using his couch as temporary accommodation was the open door opportunity I needed.

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After seeing all these one page adverts in magazines telling me time and again how incredibly easy it is to make my own compost, I visited the store and picked up a good Apartment size container and a garden fork.   Once back at the house I scrounged some dirt from an inconspicous spot, stole two lemons from his tree and some weeds, and thus began the quest...

Now, my father is a good gardener, he has a vege garden the size of my apartment, and his response when I said I wanted to compost was "just dig a hole and put it in the ground".   Yes father, unfortunately my spade can't breach the concrete.  Anyway, he gave me a lot of pointers, a lot of do's and don'ts, and when he said "I'm very interested to see how you get on" that was the immediate Father/Daughter trigger that turned the whimsical 'maybe I'll give it a try' into 'this will succeed and nothing on this earth will stop me, so help me God' project.  This is serious business my friend, serious business.  The game is ON.

So I've been documenting my progress, the good, the bad, the decomposing.  It's not as easy as the magazine will fool you into believing, but then it's not as hard as your imagination is telling you either.    It's like quitting smoking:   if you want to do it, you will.  Life is as interesting as you make it.

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Louis Vuitton Sophia Coppola PM in Cobalt and the Midori Traveler's Notebook with Mont Blanc Starwalker. 

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The Felyne has struck... mwahaha.

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Huh-huh-HUH!

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So my good friend Number 4 has settled down, bought a house and become this domesticated princess, all of which involves gardening.  And as it's a relatively new experience for her, the first attempt at growing a vegetable patch had mixed results, one of which involved an over abundance of tomato and capsicum seedlings.   It seems her expected mortality rate was grossly overcalculated.  And thus, I am in the stressful position of trying not to kill, and in fact encourage growth, of three tomato plants and five capsicums (which would be green bell peppers for you Northern Hemispherians).

This was a few weeks ago, that they were thrust into my arms in seedling mix and tiny pots, and now, seeing as they haven't in fact gone to little seedling heaven and are in actual fact growing strongly, they are now big enough to have their own pots.   Yes, a pot all to themselves!  How exciting.   So as I was repotting them, which, I have to brag, involved putting some of my own homegrown compost in with the soil mix, I began thinking about the three amigos... and so me being me, I've now named them.   

The large one at the back is Dusty Bottoms (because he was the biggest), the one at this end is Ned Nederlander (because he's little... Neddy), and the one in the middle is Lucky Day, because he's always in the middle.

Everyone say Hi to Little Neddy.    You'll get to know him well from his upcoming adventures:  "Little Neddy Learns to Grow" and "Little Neddy Bears Fruit"

And now I have to face my El Guapo.   Everyone has an El Guapo.  My El Guapo happens to be not a man named El Guapo, but the eternal struggle of life and death... and not killing plants.

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