Success in neon and sewing
11 June 2022 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeFinally! I got round to putting yet another (the fourth(!)) sleeve patch and darn into the shoulder of my pyjama jacket, and at last I have pyjamas to wear again. (Since I was previously delaying wearing them because they needed to go through the wash, I have been sleeping in my underwear for more than a week -- with hindsight it would have been much better simply to have made the necessary excavations to get my second pair of summer pyjamas out of the bottom of the remaining trunk of seasonal clothing, which I still haven't finished emptying...)
I have, however, been forced to retire not one but two pairs of pants in quick succession, one of them due to damage caused while I was trying to mend it.
And my largest mesembryanthemum popped up an unexpected neon flower this morning, with lots more now visible in bud; after last year's travails, the mesembryanthemums have been almost embarrassingly successful this time round, growing far larger than before and threatening to overspill even their wide shallow tray. The biggest one is now relatively huge.
The basil inside the greenhouse is, I think, marginally larger and more flourishing than the plants that were evacuated outside, although that may be partly because I disturbed the latter in order to remove the single lettuce-leaf basil plant (the sole survivor of the original sowing, and thus the most mature) to a pot of its own, and because I have been cautiously harvesting single leaves here and there from the outside seedlings for culinary purposes! At any rate the 'inside' basil is now getting to a stage where it will soon need to be removed before it hits the roof -- albeit the 'roof' is only about six inches high ;-)
The follow-up chillies have fared about as well as one would expect from seedlings that were moved at an early stage of germination -- the ones that were the most mature are all right, and the ones that had yet to work out which way was up are not doing well, very much reminiscent of what happened to the apple pips that I found germinating inside a core. The most vigorous seedlings are already almost as tall as the Red Demon seedlings that are months older, although to be fair the latter may well be dwarf plants by design...
On which subject, my dwarf bush tomatoes are now all in flower, as are the heritage tomatoes, the difference being that the latter have started to shoot upwards rather than remaining small! I have split up the three towel-tomatoes that I *didn't* split last time, and which probably as a result are more developed; they were leaning outwards away from each other over the edge of the pot, presumably in an attempt to find more space, and would rapidly have uprooted themselves in consequence so soon as they had any weight of fruit on them.
I have put one plant in glorious isolation into my single large pot (I probably ought to have used that one for a pair of them), put one of them back into the medium-large pot that the three were sharing previously, and used another medium-large pot for the third. That leaves me with one remaining medium-large pot.
I am also getting distinctly short of ground space, which is making it hard not only to dry any washing, but even to get close enough to the more distant pots to water them without balancing on the toes of a foot judiciously inserted into a small gap (and in constant danger of crushing surrounding foliage). Some of these plants are destined for other people -- a tray of California poppies and a six-pack of pak choi -- but I shall probably have to harden my heart and dispose of some of the overwintered corn-marigolds and corn-chamomile once they start to die back.
The corn-marigolds that overwintered in the 'wildflower trough' have never looked very healthy, producing cramped and deformed leaves, and today all looked as if they were dying without ever coming to flower. They may simply have been affected by drought earlier than the other stuff in the same soil (it was pretty dry), but I decided to uproot them in case whatever was afflicting them might spread. I really ought to clean out that trough altogether, but the true-camomile growing at one end of it is just starting to throw out flower buds...
I have, however, been forced to retire not one but two pairs of pants in quick succession, one of them due to damage caused while I was trying to mend it.
And my largest mesembryanthemum popped up an unexpected neon flower this morning, with lots more now visible in bud; after last year's travails, the mesembryanthemums have been almost embarrassingly successful this time round, growing far larger than before and threatening to overspill even their wide shallow tray. The biggest one is now relatively huge.
The basil inside the greenhouse is, I think, marginally larger and more flourishing than the plants that were evacuated outside, although that may be partly because I disturbed the latter in order to remove the single lettuce-leaf basil plant (the sole survivor of the original sowing, and thus the most mature) to a pot of its own, and because I have been cautiously harvesting single leaves here and there from the outside seedlings for culinary purposes! At any rate the 'inside' basil is now getting to a stage where it will soon need to be removed before it hits the roof -- albeit the 'roof' is only about six inches high ;-)
The follow-up chillies have fared about as well as one would expect from seedlings that were moved at an early stage of germination -- the ones that were the most mature are all right, and the ones that had yet to work out which way was up are not doing well, very much reminiscent of what happened to the apple pips that I found germinating inside a core. The most vigorous seedlings are already almost as tall as the Red Demon seedlings that are months older, although to be fair the latter may well be dwarf plants by design...
On which subject, my dwarf bush tomatoes are now all in flower, as are the heritage tomatoes, the difference being that the latter have started to shoot upwards rather than remaining small! I have split up the three towel-tomatoes that I *didn't* split last time, and which probably as a result are more developed; they were leaning outwards away from each other over the edge of the pot, presumably in an attempt to find more space, and would rapidly have uprooted themselves in consequence so soon as they had any weight of fruit on them.
I have put one plant in glorious isolation into my single large pot (I probably ought to have used that one for a pair of them), put one of them back into the medium-large pot that the three were sharing previously, and used another medium-large pot for the third. That leaves me with one remaining medium-large pot.
I am also getting distinctly short of ground space, which is making it hard not only to dry any washing, but even to get close enough to the more distant pots to water them without balancing on the toes of a foot judiciously inserted into a small gap (and in constant danger of crushing surrounding foliage). Some of these plants are destined for other people -- a tray of California poppies and a six-pack of pak choi -- but I shall probably have to harden my heart and dispose of some of the overwintered corn-marigolds and corn-chamomile once they start to die back.
The corn-marigolds that overwintered in the 'wildflower trough' have never looked very healthy, producing cramped and deformed leaves, and today all looked as if they were dying without ever coming to flower. They may simply have been affected by drought earlier than the other stuff in the same soil (it was pretty dry), but I decided to uproot them in case whatever was afflicting them might spread. I really ought to clean out that trough altogether, but the true-camomile growing at one end of it is just starting to throw out flower buds...