Splitting things up
29 April 2025 08:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI went to the library to upload "A Sword Outwears Its Sheath" to FFnet, carefully took with me a USB stick containing a couple of painstakingly cropped (to different resolutions) 6:9 ratio images, as required for 'cover art', uploaded the larger of the two to the Image Manager... and then forgot to add it to the actual story, while I was busy dithering as to whether I ought to upload it under "Musketeers" (listed under 'Books' but seems to be mainly BBC series-based), "Three Musketeers", or "Alexandre Dumas"! I eventually went for the latter option, given that it's really a "Twenty Years After" fic rather than a "Three Musketeers" one, and there are more stories under the general Dumas heading, most of which *are* Musketeers-based (though I spotted one Monte Cristo!)
But probably as with "Phantom of the Opera" fic fandom activity has coalesced around a single section, whether strictly applicable or not, and I ought to put it into the (ten times larger) "Books: Musketeers" category. I didn't even check out to see if there was a "TV:Musketeers" category, though there probably is; but if there isn't, or wasn't at the point when the BBC fandom was most active, then TV fic may well have consolidated in the books section...
Anyway, amidst all this I completely forgot to add my cover art, having somewhat reluctantly been obliged to lie in the upload screen about whether I owned the rights to it. (I don't think the fanvid from which I screencapped it owned the rights either, and the Odessa studio has, after all, released the films for free on its YouTube channel and probably isn't chasing people, Disney-fashion, for copyright on its iconic imagery...)
This evening I dissected the soggy cardboard of the six-pack, into which the roots of the seedlings had of course entwined themselves, making separating and transplanting them more and not less traumatic :-(
We have three Gysophila elegans seedlings -- which I was quite unable to separate and ended up flattening out sideways in a wide pot to try to gain some distance between the plants! -- and several Gypsophila vaccaria, even though I pulled out at least one of those at the seedling stage because it strongly resembled yet another shoo-fly. I split those between a couple of smallish pots, having emptied the supposed Coreopsis pot and transferred the smaller pink Linaria (and four healthy and vigorous possible Blue River daisies around its base!) into a wider pot, mainly in order to free up the small one -- I have no small or medium-small pots left. I then used this pot to put the possibly-white California poppy seedling from the final segment of the six-pack into. If it lives, it will be an interesting but not conclusive genetic experiment!
For similar motives I transplanted a largish towel-tomato that was in a distinctly small pot up into a medium-large one; that probably won't be its final home, but it will do for a while. The second sick-looking towel-tomato has duly collapsed, which so far as I can see leaves me with only five out of the original eight :-( I have planted up another square of towel, although the beginning of May is far too late for starting tomatoes -- it may germinate, and the plants may rush on into a belated maturity in the hot weather and produce some fruit by the end of the season. Or I can just give my surviving towel-tomato plants (assuming they don't all get the same blight...) a bit more space each, and probably get the same crop after all :-p
I also split up the 'new' chillies, on the suspicion that the compost was holding them back or perhaps getting compacted, since they had been in that same small pot for a month and a half and the surface was beginning to go green. The others definitely did seem to do better after being split up, although of course they were planted first, so perhaps it's not surprising that they are somewhat more developed.
Of course I don't actually *need* anything like all those seedlings to survive, and could in fact quite simply have ditched this pot altogether... but from a gardening point of view I want to see how they respond. Some of them when extracted did actually have decent roots on them, better than I remember the others having at the time when they were transplanted. However the soil was definitely not compacted, but in fact very dark and friable and healthy-looking underneath the surface -- though that doesn't mean that it has any nutrients in it, after being recycled multiple times! I can only trust to the worms, and keep adding artificial feed once the plants get big enough...
Likewise I transplanted one of my smaller pots of marigolds into a larger one out of the motive to use the pot for something else, although most of those marigolds have been flourishing mightily and do rather need repotting! I have split up the main pot of Swan River daisies -- without labelling them, which I hope wasn't a mistake; they should be large enough to recognise now...
But probably as with "Phantom of the Opera" fic fandom activity has coalesced around a single section, whether strictly applicable or not, and I ought to put it into the (ten times larger) "Books: Musketeers" category. I didn't even check out to see if there was a "TV:Musketeers" category, though there probably is; but if there isn't, or wasn't at the point when the BBC fandom was most active, then TV fic may well have consolidated in the books section...
Anyway, amidst all this I completely forgot to add my cover art, having somewhat reluctantly been obliged to lie in the upload screen about whether I owned the rights to it. (I don't think the fanvid from which I screencapped it owned the rights either, and the Odessa studio has, after all, released the films for free on its YouTube channel and probably isn't chasing people, Disney-fashion, for copyright on its iconic imagery...)
This evening I dissected the soggy cardboard of the six-pack, into which the roots of the seedlings had of course entwined themselves, making separating and transplanting them more and not less traumatic :-(
We have three Gysophila elegans seedlings -- which I was quite unable to separate and ended up flattening out sideways in a wide pot to try to gain some distance between the plants! -- and several Gypsophila vaccaria, even though I pulled out at least one of those at the seedling stage because it strongly resembled yet another shoo-fly. I split those between a couple of smallish pots, having emptied the supposed Coreopsis pot and transferred the smaller pink Linaria (and four healthy and vigorous possible Blue River daisies around its base!) into a wider pot, mainly in order to free up the small one -- I have no small or medium-small pots left. I then used this pot to put the possibly-white California poppy seedling from the final segment of the six-pack into. If it lives, it will be an interesting but not conclusive genetic experiment!
For similar motives I transplanted a largish towel-tomato that was in a distinctly small pot up into a medium-large one; that probably won't be its final home, but it will do for a while. The second sick-looking towel-tomato has duly collapsed, which so far as I can see leaves me with only five out of the original eight :-( I have planted up another square of towel, although the beginning of May is far too late for starting tomatoes -- it may germinate, and the plants may rush on into a belated maturity in the hot weather and produce some fruit by the end of the season. Or I can just give my surviving towel-tomato plants (assuming they don't all get the same blight...) a bit more space each, and probably get the same crop after all :-p
I also split up the 'new' chillies, on the suspicion that the compost was holding them back or perhaps getting compacted, since they had been in that same small pot for a month and a half and the surface was beginning to go green. The others definitely did seem to do better after being split up, although of course they were planted first, so perhaps it's not surprising that they are somewhat more developed.
Of course I don't actually *need* anything like all those seedlings to survive, and could in fact quite simply have ditched this pot altogether... but from a gardening point of view I want to see how they respond. Some of them when extracted did actually have decent roots on them, better than I remember the others having at the time when they were transplanted. However the soil was definitely not compacted, but in fact very dark and friable and healthy-looking underneath the surface -- though that doesn't mean that it has any nutrients in it, after being recycled multiple times! I can only trust to the worms, and keep adding artificial feed once the plants get big enough...
Likewise I transplanted one of my smaller pots of marigolds into a larger one out of the motive to use the pot for something else, although most of those marigolds have been flourishing mightily and do rather need repotting! I have split up the main pot of Swan River daisies -- without labelling them, which I hope wasn't a mistake; they should be large enough to recognise now...