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Transplant
I have been really struggling to meet the water needs of my tomato plants in the renewed heat (nice warm temperatures of around 70 degrees coupled with plentiful rain were much better for plant growth). Meanwhile the overwintered corn-chamomile plants that were putting on a fine display in the two large pots that I had originally destined for this year's tomatoes have finished flowering and died and dried up; I spent some time attempting to winnow out a usable seed collection from the dry heads -- having eventually worked out that the actual seeds are right down at the bottom and in practice you have to split the spiky dry head open to get them out -- so that I could empty out the larger of the pots.
I'd assumed that my tomatoes had missed the boat in terms of being moved into larger pots, since they are now fruiting and flowering prolifically and have reached the mystical stage of 'setting the second truss', after which one is allowed to administer official tomato feed. But according to the Internet it is actually possible to transplant tomatoes in fruit, and since the three towel-tomatoes which were sharing a six-inch pot were clearly quite horribly pot-bound (and were the smallest and easiest to handle of the various tomato plants, presumably in consequence) I thought I would give it a go.
So I removed the majority of the old compost (which turned out to contain an ants' nest with at least two queens in it) and removed the surviving plants that had been struggling to compete with the chamomile: a couple of self-sown corn-marigolds, a couple of malnourished Oriental poppies, and the chilli seedling that I had thinned out (whose siblings are now in individual pots, covered in flower buds, and about two feet high; this one had barely grown at all and is still only about three inches tall). I got the tomato root-ball out of the old pot in one piece, thanks to the fact that the plants did indeed turn out to be almost totally pot-bound, put it into the much bigger pot and earthed it up with a lot of fresh compost to a level partway up the stems, in the hopes that the plants would respond by putting out new roots from the aerial root-buds already visible. I also took the opportunity to insert some much larger and sturdier support sticks into the pot, having harvested some windfall branches from the local park a few days ago!
It remains to be seen how the plants respond to this trauma, especially given the high temperatures forecast for the next few days. The two towel-tomatoes that I transplanted out of that pot last month did eventually recover and manage to overtake the crowded three left behind, as did the magazine-tomato that went into a big pot by itself (and is now bigger than any of the rest, although the small ones have just as many flower-buds for much less foliage). Interestingly, the two varieties do seem to be producing fruits of a subtly different shape; the magazine-tomatoes seem to be more spherical and 'cherry' shaped, while the towel-tomatoes are more of a mini-plum shape. Theoretically this should enable me to identify which batch the mystery extra tomato that appeared in the dill pot came from -- I couldn't bring myself to uproot it, and amazingly it produced flowers and now a couple of fruits, despite being in a pot only about four inches square. My impression is that it is more of a plum shape, but I really do not see how the towel-tomatoes (which were attached to a paper towel which had been buried in a different pot months earlier) could *possibly* have jumped into the dill during the potting-up process :-p
At the very least the larger pot for the towel-tomatoes will give me a far larger daily 'reservoir' of water before the plants start drying up and wilting and/or overbalancing due to their mass of foliage. Today I think I had to water them four times, and that was despite a screen rigged up from an old sheet to deflect the direct sunlight :-(
I transplanted a couple of marigolds in full bloom last week, and it doesn't seem to have set them back at all -- somewhat to my surprise, since in that case the process involved considerable root trauma when removing them from the pot of the chilli-plant with which they had become intertwined! I don't know how well the 'rescued' plants out of the corn-chamomile pot will do, but I put them into the vacated smaller pot with some of the old compost on the grounds that they deserved a chance. The compost actually wasn't nearly as full of roots as I assumed it would be, given the size of the chamomile and the way it seemed to have inhibited anything else growing there; when they die back the roots do seem to simply disappear, leaving a dry stem that pulls up easily, and I suppose they must rot back into the soil. But I can't imagine it has a lot of nutrients left in it. Still, the plants are no worse off in that respect than they were before, and none of them seemed to have a lot of root of their own to start off with -- presumably due to the prior competition?
I planted a second batch of three or four calendula seeds from a second handkerchief-full of seed collected the subsequent week, but not one of them germinated, and in the end I tumbled the compost from all the egg-carton compartments into a small pot for the single successful seedling. Sometimes this will induce further germination as seeds randomly end up at a more favourable depth -- but not this time, so the viability is evidently quite low, about one in eight or nine seeds tried, I think. I had better cherish this one and hope it overwinters in case I can't germinate any more!
The various chilli plants have all now been singled out and potted up and are all producing flower buds. I know the ones we used to have in the greenhouse needed to be hand-pollinated -- as we discovered when only the buds which happened to have got wedged pointing upwards actually set fruit when the pollen got dislodged! I have quite a few insects buzzing around, but was prepared to hand-pollinate these flowers as well... but somewhat to my dismay, they don't appear to have any pollen at all, or at least none that comes off on a finger-tip. The first few flowers have now dried up and are starting to drop off, and I'm honestly not certain whether they have set fruit or not. Yesterday I thought they hadn't, and today I thought the little green knob left behind might potentially be the start of a chilli. The flowers were much longer than the little window-sill-sized ones I'm used to, so I'm afraid these probably are going to come out as the two- or three-inch fruits from which the seed was taken, as I suspected; I didn't get a lot of choice as to what I would receive when I ordered 'a chilli' from the greengrocer!
(I have, however, deliberately purchased a bag of 'heritage tomatoes' which included a cherry tomato or two, and saved the seed from those on a paper towel for *next* year, now that I know it can reliably be done; those should breed true, I assume. Although the current batch of towel-tomatoes are looking encouragingly like their small, prolific-fruiting progenitor...)
I finally got my bicycle serviced after a year and a half, much to my relief! I have fresh brake-blocks, the wheels have been taken off and trued, and the whole machine somehow feels much tauter and whippier than it did -- I thought that was the result of my having temporarily taken off the lock and panniers so it could be worked on more easily, but the effect has persisted :-)
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of work to be done; I paid a hundred and twenty pounds, which seemed more than reasonable given that I'd missed three normal services. I *finally* have a working lighting system again, after many months without one when the automatic regulator from the dynamo went wrong (thus curtailing my early-lockdown habits of going out for evening cycle exercise; I wasn't able to ride after dark all last winter, and have quite got out of the habit of it).
The parts for my standlight system, which was state-of-the-art twenty years ago when I first bought it, are no longer readily available (which was the reason why the bike shop was unable to replace the regulator when it initially went wrong), so I now have a jury-rigged system with a standard LED front light wired directly into the dynamo circuit with an on/off switch on the top of it, and the old rear standlight wired into the circuit with no switch at all so that it is constantly on, "for safety" (or, as I suspect, simply because that was the only way to get it to work without the automatic regulator!) As a result I no longer have a front standlight; it was only ever a dim orange glow from a single LED, much more feeble than modern bright-white LEDs which did not yet exist, and the back one is more important from the point of view of not getting rear-ended by a car overtaking in the dark. It does make the bicycle more dubiously legal, though. (Not as illegal as having no lights at all, which meant I was completely unable to ride it after about 3pm in the winter.)
The fact that the rear lighting circuit is now constantly on means theoretically that there is more drag, but as it is a hub dynamo and the LEDs take very little current that's probably not much of an issue. Presumably it does imply that the light will burn out earlier than it would otherwise have done.
Current odometer reading (and that device is definitely still malfunctioning, and can't be fixed without a complete replacement): 2782.0 -- another two hundred-plus miles since April. My mileage has gone up a lot now that I'm regularly doing a round trip of ten or twelve miles to market, which was one reason why I was getting very worried about the lack of servicing; the old market was within an hour's walk, if the worst came to the worst. This one simply isn't accessible on foot.
Chapter Seven of Hertha is finally complete, I think, and I have one sentence(!) of what is presumably going to be my masquerade-chapter written. (I got distracted this morning by attempts to ascertain whether there actually was a hippopotamus in residence at the Jardin des Plantes in the 1880s... and I still have to decide what costume Hertha actually is going to wear to the masquerade, since she isn't really going to go as a hippopotamus, however much she may be feeling like one :p)
The last chapter ended up as colossally long (about six and a half thousand words as versus the 'target' of four thousand), since we're covering the pregnancy storyline plus Raoul's 'birthday fête', which was trailed in the opening chapter and I'm afraid subsequently rather forgotten about by the author, plus the whole business of establishing the new setting out at Beauvais. Nowadays Beauvais is apparently the site of a satellite airport for Paris, in the spirit of 'London Luton' -- I picked it because I wanted an area that would be a credible day's carriage journey from Paris, but at the end of the chapter I've managed to depict Hertha doing the return trip in a single day (albeit getting up very early and returning after dark), which I now realise probably isn't plausible :-(
That's what you get for spending months over writing a chapter and forgetting the details of your initial research... I suppose it's the equivalent of a day-trip by train from London to Glasgow, which is just about feasible (my parents did it; nine hours' travel and some lunch-time sight-seeing). You'd need changes of horses, though, to keep up a steady ten miles an hour, and overall I don't think it's all that believable simply for the sake of a doctor's appointment.
(I suppose I could just use a different name and have the destination be an entirely fictional one at an arbitrary random distance ;-p)
I'd assumed that my tomatoes had missed the boat in terms of being moved into larger pots, since they are now fruiting and flowering prolifically and have reached the mystical stage of 'setting the second truss', after which one is allowed to administer official tomato feed. But according to the Internet it is actually possible to transplant tomatoes in fruit, and since the three towel-tomatoes which were sharing a six-inch pot were clearly quite horribly pot-bound (and were the smallest and easiest to handle of the various tomato plants, presumably in consequence) I thought I would give it a go.
So I removed the majority of the old compost (which turned out to contain an ants' nest with at least two queens in it) and removed the surviving plants that had been struggling to compete with the chamomile: a couple of self-sown corn-marigolds, a couple of malnourished Oriental poppies, and the chilli seedling that I had thinned out (whose siblings are now in individual pots, covered in flower buds, and about two feet high; this one had barely grown at all and is still only about three inches tall). I got the tomato root-ball out of the old pot in one piece, thanks to the fact that the plants did indeed turn out to be almost totally pot-bound, put it into the much bigger pot and earthed it up with a lot of fresh compost to a level partway up the stems, in the hopes that the plants would respond by putting out new roots from the aerial root-buds already visible. I also took the opportunity to insert some much larger and sturdier support sticks into the pot, having harvested some windfall branches from the local park a few days ago!
It remains to be seen how the plants respond to this trauma, especially given the high temperatures forecast for the next few days. The two towel-tomatoes that I transplanted out of that pot last month did eventually recover and manage to overtake the crowded three left behind, as did the magazine-tomato that went into a big pot by itself (and is now bigger than any of the rest, although the small ones have just as many flower-buds for much less foliage). Interestingly, the two varieties do seem to be producing fruits of a subtly different shape; the magazine-tomatoes seem to be more spherical and 'cherry' shaped, while the towel-tomatoes are more of a mini-plum shape. Theoretically this should enable me to identify which batch the mystery extra tomato that appeared in the dill pot came from -- I couldn't bring myself to uproot it, and amazingly it produced flowers and now a couple of fruits, despite being in a pot only about four inches square. My impression is that it is more of a plum shape, but I really do not see how the towel-tomatoes (which were attached to a paper towel which had been buried in a different pot months earlier) could *possibly* have jumped into the dill during the potting-up process :-p
At the very least the larger pot for the towel-tomatoes will give me a far larger daily 'reservoir' of water before the plants start drying up and wilting and/or overbalancing due to their mass of foliage. Today I think I had to water them four times, and that was despite a screen rigged up from an old sheet to deflect the direct sunlight :-(
I transplanted a couple of marigolds in full bloom last week, and it doesn't seem to have set them back at all -- somewhat to my surprise, since in that case the process involved considerable root trauma when removing them from the pot of the chilli-plant with which they had become intertwined! I don't know how well the 'rescued' plants out of the corn-chamomile pot will do, but I put them into the vacated smaller pot with some of the old compost on the grounds that they deserved a chance. The compost actually wasn't nearly as full of roots as I assumed it would be, given the size of the chamomile and the way it seemed to have inhibited anything else growing there; when they die back the roots do seem to simply disappear, leaving a dry stem that pulls up easily, and I suppose they must rot back into the soil. But I can't imagine it has a lot of nutrients left in it. Still, the plants are no worse off in that respect than they were before, and none of them seemed to have a lot of root of their own to start off with -- presumably due to the prior competition?
I planted a second batch of three or four calendula seeds from a second handkerchief-full of seed collected the subsequent week, but not one of them germinated, and in the end I tumbled the compost from all the egg-carton compartments into a small pot for the single successful seedling. Sometimes this will induce further germination as seeds randomly end up at a more favourable depth -- but not this time, so the viability is evidently quite low, about one in eight or nine seeds tried, I think. I had better cherish this one and hope it overwinters in case I can't germinate any more!
The various chilli plants have all now been singled out and potted up and are all producing flower buds. I know the ones we used to have in the greenhouse needed to be hand-pollinated -- as we discovered when only the buds which happened to have got wedged pointing upwards actually set fruit when the pollen got dislodged! I have quite a few insects buzzing around, but was prepared to hand-pollinate these flowers as well... but somewhat to my dismay, they don't appear to have any pollen at all, or at least none that comes off on a finger-tip. The first few flowers have now dried up and are starting to drop off, and I'm honestly not certain whether they have set fruit or not. Yesterday I thought they hadn't, and today I thought the little green knob left behind might potentially be the start of a chilli. The flowers were much longer than the little window-sill-sized ones I'm used to, so I'm afraid these probably are going to come out as the two- or three-inch fruits from which the seed was taken, as I suspected; I didn't get a lot of choice as to what I would receive when I ordered 'a chilli' from the greengrocer!
(I have, however, deliberately purchased a bag of 'heritage tomatoes' which included a cherry tomato or two, and saved the seed from those on a paper towel for *next* year, now that I know it can reliably be done; those should breed true, I assume. Although the current batch of towel-tomatoes are looking encouragingly like their small, prolific-fruiting progenitor...)
I finally got my bicycle serviced after a year and a half, much to my relief! I have fresh brake-blocks, the wheels have been taken off and trued, and the whole machine somehow feels much tauter and whippier than it did -- I thought that was the result of my having temporarily taken off the lock and panniers so it could be worked on more easily, but the effect has persisted :-)
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of work to be done; I paid a hundred and twenty pounds, which seemed more than reasonable given that I'd missed three normal services. I *finally* have a working lighting system again, after many months without one when the automatic regulator from the dynamo went wrong (thus curtailing my early-lockdown habits of going out for evening cycle exercise; I wasn't able to ride after dark all last winter, and have quite got out of the habit of it).
The parts for my standlight system, which was state-of-the-art twenty years ago when I first bought it, are no longer readily available (which was the reason why the bike shop was unable to replace the regulator when it initially went wrong), so I now have a jury-rigged system with a standard LED front light wired directly into the dynamo circuit with an on/off switch on the top of it, and the old rear standlight wired into the circuit with no switch at all so that it is constantly on, "for safety" (or, as I suspect, simply because that was the only way to get it to work without the automatic regulator!) As a result I no longer have a front standlight; it was only ever a dim orange glow from a single LED, much more feeble than modern bright-white LEDs which did not yet exist, and the back one is more important from the point of view of not getting rear-ended by a car overtaking in the dark. It does make the bicycle more dubiously legal, though. (Not as illegal as having no lights at all, which meant I was completely unable to ride it after about 3pm in the winter.)
The fact that the rear lighting circuit is now constantly on means theoretically that there is more drag, but as it is a hub dynamo and the LEDs take very little current that's probably not much of an issue. Presumably it does imply that the light will burn out earlier than it would otherwise have done.
Current odometer reading (and that device is definitely still malfunctioning, and can't be fixed without a complete replacement): 2782.0 -- another two hundred-plus miles since April. My mileage has gone up a lot now that I'm regularly doing a round trip of ten or twelve miles to market, which was one reason why I was getting very worried about the lack of servicing; the old market was within an hour's walk, if the worst came to the worst. This one simply isn't accessible on foot.
Chapter Seven of Hertha is finally complete, I think, and I have one sentence(!) of what is presumably going to be my masquerade-chapter written. (I got distracted this morning by attempts to ascertain whether there actually was a hippopotamus in residence at the Jardin des Plantes in the 1880s... and I still have to decide what costume Hertha actually is going to wear to the masquerade, since she isn't really going to go as a hippopotamus, however much she may be feeling like one :p)
The last chapter ended up as colossally long (about six and a half thousand words as versus the 'target' of four thousand), since we're covering the pregnancy storyline plus Raoul's 'birthday fête', which was trailed in the opening chapter and I'm afraid subsequently rather forgotten about by the author, plus the whole business of establishing the new setting out at Beauvais. Nowadays Beauvais is apparently the site of a satellite airport for Paris, in the spirit of 'London Luton' -- I picked it because I wanted an area that would be a credible day's carriage journey from Paris, but at the end of the chapter I've managed to depict Hertha doing the return trip in a single day (albeit getting up very early and returning after dark), which I now realise probably isn't plausible :-(
That's what you get for spending months over writing a chapter and forgetting the details of your initial research... I suppose it's the equivalent of a day-trip by train from London to Glasgow, which is just about feasible (my parents did it; nine hours' travel and some lunch-time sight-seeing). You'd need changes of horses, though, to keep up a steady ten miles an hour, and overall I don't think it's all that believable simply for the sake of a doctor's appointment.
(I suppose I could just use a different name and have the destination be an entirely fictional one at an arbitrary random distance ;-p)