Splitting up
5 May 2026 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI finally got round to splitting up the various things that have been germinating in the dill pot, three or four of which were dill. I have been putting this off because, in addition to all my other normal reasons for putting things off, I couldn't be sure whether any of the winter purslane seeds might have germinated, or might yet be about to germinate; however, I now have several large plants that look as if they are more likely to be cornflower or flax, and some that are either Linaria, toadflax or alyssum, plus some that I already identified as chickweed or Oriental poppies and pulled out. I suspect the one that I had hoped was another mesembryanthemum is actually only the furry leaves of a forget-me-not, and I don't think I'm going to get any purslane out of that handful of seeds (which may or may not have ripened sufficiently in the first place). However, I have left the remaining soil in the tray just in case anything further germinates in it :-(
I also repotted a couple more of the dwarf peas into a large pot with twiggy pea-sticks, giving up the hopes of getting pea-shoots out of the pot into which I had put the left-over seed -- a couple of them did germinate, but don't have enough vigour to cut. I still appear to be losing towel-tomatoes: the mortality rate has been horrific, given that I started out with seventeen seedlings and three-quarters of them have probably collapsed at this point :-(
The surviving orange poppy has opened its single delicately coloured flower for its few days of life, which are now over. We shall see whether it successfully set seed; if it did, it will presumably have had to self-fertilise...
In addition I attempted to split apart the not-a-strawberry plant from the strawberry that it was busy suffocating, but they were so tightly intermingled that in the end I had to simply break off the top of the not-strawberry and split away its white fleshy roots one by one, doing my best to destroy the plant if I could not remove it. We shall see if the strawberry survives. The other surviving strawberry plants are currently in flower, though still not looking very vigorous (if anything I think they have died back since last year).
Lesson 21 was another unexpected misfire from the Russian TV course, being basically an inferior reprise of the winter sport vocabulary in Lesson 18, only with worse acting and a lot less plot :-( I note that Lesson 18 is credited to the Kiev educational film studios and Lesson 21 to their Leningrad counterparts, so possibly the repetition was the result of someone carelessly assigning the same course material to two different production teams; at any rate the second team were evidently a good deal less creatively inspired by it than the first.
I also repotted a couple more of the dwarf peas into a large pot with twiggy pea-sticks, giving up the hopes of getting pea-shoots out of the pot into which I had put the left-over seed -- a couple of them did germinate, but don't have enough vigour to cut. I still appear to be losing towel-tomatoes: the mortality rate has been horrific, given that I started out with seventeen seedlings and three-quarters of them have probably collapsed at this point :-(
The surviving orange poppy has opened its single delicately coloured flower for its few days of life, which are now over. We shall see whether it successfully set seed; if it did, it will presumably have had to self-fertilise...
In addition I attempted to split apart the not-a-strawberry plant from the strawberry that it was busy suffocating, but they were so tightly intermingled that in the end I had to simply break off the top of the not-strawberry and split away its white fleshy roots one by one, doing my best to destroy the plant if I could not remove it. We shall see if the strawberry survives. The other surviving strawberry plants are currently in flower, though still not looking very vigorous (if anything I think they have died back since last year).
Lesson 21 was another unexpected misfire from the Russian TV course, being basically an inferior reprise of the winter sport vocabulary in Lesson 18, only with worse acting and a lot less plot :-( I note that Lesson 18 is credited to the Kiev educational film studios and Lesson 21 to their Leningrad counterparts, so possibly the repetition was the result of someone carelessly assigning the same course material to two different production teams; at any rate the second team were evidently a good deal less creatively inspired by it than the first.