Plant maintenance
15 April 2026 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finally got round to emptying out the remaining brown-paper pots, all of which were so terribly dry that I wasn't sure the roots of the seedlings would survive the handling :-( I'm afraid those pots probably lose water through the sides as well as from drying out on the surface of the soil -- and also, of course, the total volume is very small.
I planted up a couple of pots of *mixed* Gypsophila elegans and pink Linaria, the latter so far as I remember growing much more tall and less bushy than the former (and they did after all originally co-exist in the same seed mix), and one tub of the pink Linaria on its own, after which I very strong-minded threw the rest of those tiny-tiny Linaria seedlings away instead of potting them all up individually...
The Swan River daisies I put into a couple of pots of three seedlings each, and tucked an extra Gypsophila elegans into one of them (memo to self). They will definitely need splitting up and potting on later.
I also took out and put more soil into the bottom of a couple of the kale pots, where the surface appeared to have compacted a long way down over the past year, or, in the case of the original stump, was entirely composed of an inch or so of moss :-O
They have been drying out terribly quickly, and given the size of a natural adult kale plant, it is a lot to ask of them to exist in such a small space. (They should really have been potted up with one seedling per pot instead of three in the first place, but I had too many seedlings and probably thought vaguely that I would be splitting them up later on; however, they have actually been cropping well as 'baby leaves' under these conditions, and I really don't have the room for that many individual pots of kale...)
Tumbled the entirety of the tub of flax into a deeper pot without splitting up the root-ball at all. The marigolds are the other thing that really needs potting up, but that means finding a lot of individual pots and of compost to fill them, and I couldn't face it.
No sign of germination from my second attempt at chives, despite the success of the spring onions; I'm afraid the seed library appears to have been a dead loss on my first attempt. I hope the seed I donated there is doing better for other people :-(
I planted up a couple of pots of *mixed* Gypsophila elegans and pink Linaria, the latter so far as I remember growing much more tall and less bushy than the former (and they did after all originally co-exist in the same seed mix), and one tub of the pink Linaria on its own, after which I very strong-minded threw the rest of those tiny-tiny Linaria seedlings away instead of potting them all up individually...
The Swan River daisies I put into a couple of pots of three seedlings each, and tucked an extra Gypsophila elegans into one of them (memo to self). They will definitely need splitting up and potting on later.
I also took out and put more soil into the bottom of a couple of the kale pots, where the surface appeared to have compacted a long way down over the past year, or, in the case of the original stump, was entirely composed of an inch or so of moss :-O
They have been drying out terribly quickly, and given the size of a natural adult kale plant, it is a lot to ask of them to exist in such a small space. (They should really have been potted up with one seedling per pot instead of three in the first place, but I had too many seedlings and probably thought vaguely that I would be splitting them up later on; however, they have actually been cropping well as 'baby leaves' under these conditions, and I really don't have the room for that many individual pots of kale...)
Tumbled the entirety of the tub of flax into a deeper pot without splitting up the root-ball at all. The marigolds are the other thing that really needs potting up, but that means finding a lot of individual pots and of compost to fill them, and I couldn't face it.
No sign of germination from my second attempt at chives, despite the success of the spring onions; I'm afraid the seed library appears to have been a dead loss on my first attempt. I hope the seed I donated there is doing better for other people :-(