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igenlodeThe soil was warm (although it's still only 58F in here with no direct sunlight!) and I planted some more seed. Basil, Swan River daisy, field poppies and Oriental poppies, a few more chives, a square of the 'heritage cherry' tomatoes I bought from a stall last summer specifically so that I could save the seed (although they did taste good), and a square of what will I am afraid be known in perpetuity as the 'towel-tomatoes', despite the fact that the other seed was also saved on a towel; I have no other name for them! This is how plants acquire bizarre-seeming nomenclature.
I think I may have rediscovered the 'missing' yellow poppy plant... in the pot I used to sow the dill seed in :-p
At any rate, something is shooting vigorously from ground level, and the foliage looks plausible.
The crown of my strawberry plant is at last showing signs of sending out new leaves, so I finally broke off and removed a lot of the old dead foliage that had been gradually dying back all winter -- presumably we shan't get any more frosts now. It was absolutely full of small snails. What was more, the top layer of soil underneath was full of tiny pinhead hatchling snails; I don't know if they were brought in with the plant, or if (very likely) my existing population simply adopted the strawberry-leaves as a safe habitat.
All I could do was repeat what I attempt to do with the frequent caches of snail-eggs I have been finding in the pots as I empty them out and replant: to spread the contaminated soil out thinly in hot sunshine and hope it dries them up and kills them off. It seems to work on the eggs (at least, they disappear), but of course eggs can't crawl into shelter :-p
To my surprise, both the pink Swan River daisy and the mesembryanthemum seed that I sowed indoors a few days ago seems to be germinating already -- you know that winter is over when the sun comes round far enough for the bathroom to cease to be a useful pantry and cold-room, and become a useful greenhouse instead! I'm not entirely sure about the mesembryanthemum, because that seed is like dust, but I'm pretty sure there are a whole lot of tiny curved white bits in there which weren't there before and are probably the roots/shoots emerging... amazing, when you think how much endless trouble I had getting any to survive last year! Of course I now know that they are manna for slugs, damp off very easily, and grow horizontally rather than vertically and will break their own stems if required to support the weight of more than a couple of leaves...
I think I may have rediscovered the 'missing' yellow poppy plant... in the pot I used to sow the dill seed in :-p
At any rate, something is shooting vigorously from ground level, and the foliage looks plausible.
The crown of my strawberry plant is at last showing signs of sending out new leaves, so I finally broke off and removed a lot of the old dead foliage that had been gradually dying back all winter -- presumably we shan't get any more frosts now. It was absolutely full of small snails. What was more, the top layer of soil underneath was full of tiny pinhead hatchling snails; I don't know if they were brought in with the plant, or if (very likely) my existing population simply adopted the strawberry-leaves as a safe habitat.
All I could do was repeat what I attempt to do with the frequent caches of snail-eggs I have been finding in the pots as I empty them out and replant: to spread the contaminated soil out thinly in hot sunshine and hope it dries them up and kills them off. It seems to work on the eggs (at least, they disappear), but of course eggs can't crawl into shelter :-p
To my surprise, both the pink Swan River daisy and the mesembryanthemum seed that I sowed indoors a few days ago seems to be germinating already -- you know that winter is over when the sun comes round far enough for the bathroom to cease to be a useful pantry and cold-room, and become a useful greenhouse instead! I'm not entirely sure about the mesembryanthemum, because that seed is like dust, but I'm pretty sure there are a whole lot of tiny curved white bits in there which weren't there before and are probably the roots/shoots emerging... amazing, when you think how much endless trouble I had getting any to survive last year! Of course I now know that they are manna for slugs, damp off very easily, and grow horizontally rather than vertically and will break their own stems if required to support the weight of more than a couple of leaves...
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Date: 2022-03-21 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-21 06:22 pm (UTC)Snails I don't mind so much -- the resident species doesn't seem to grow larger than half an inch or so in diameter and their appetites seem commensurately small. The only thing they really damage are pansy flowers. (At a guess they are probably Discus rotundatus, which is said to eat mainly leaf litter.)