laceblade

Growing stuff is going better this year than it did last year.

My spider plants are a little crabby about the buckets of rain - I finally brought them inside yesterday. Right now they're hanging out on the porch, but I expect to bring them in this afternoon, when our chance of rain gets to about 60%.
Spider plants are gr9 because not much maintenance is needed. Sometimes, cut off yellowed leaves. I do need to get some pots for the two small babies growing off of the main one.
I am now one of those people with "too many" spider plants. BUT. These are about the only ones that last through the winter, so it will be nice to have them around then.

Other Indoor Plants
The peace lily, which is large, is doing well. No flowers for a long time, but the leaves are quite beautiful. I keep this one in our bedroom. I like to think that the plant helps make the air better, although I have no idea that's actually true.

My rabbit foot fern has seen better days - I won't be surprised if it dies soon, but I have had it for a few months.

I had bought an orange flowered plant from the farmer's market a couple weeks ago, & it just went through a mostly sudden and violent death :(

Things I'm growing from seed
This is going much better than last year.
Instead of using toilet paper rolls, I got some black plastic planters, the ones where each "pack" has six segments. These work way better! Out of things I planted into 5 segments, 6 are doing great.

While I live in the same apartment building as last year, I'm now on the top floor. I think this means that the plants outside & the ones next to the patio door are getting more sunlight.

One plastic segment = marigold, which is much bigger than the tiny tendrils I planted last year.

I planted two segments of arugula. This morning, I moved them both into a tiny pink pot. I hope they get over the trauma of being repotted & continue to grow - they're about 2-3 inches tall right now. I keep wanting to bite one :3

I also have two segments of Mexican sour gherkin, which are looking nice!

Lastly, there's the basil growing inside a miniature plastic greenhouse that I bought at Target for $1. These are growing strong!

Things I bought as plants
Lettuce: bought from the farmer's market as a variety bush. I should cut & eat a few leaves today.
This morning, I moved it from its plastic holder into a larger pot. This wilts dramatically when it wants water, bahaha.

Cucumber: For this one, the plant itself looks sturdy. I moved it to a pot this morning, from its plastic holder. Although there's no flowers or etc. yet, it smelled like cucumber when I did it.

Thyme: Very bushy! Smells & looks amazing.

Pictures & Advice
I posted about my Mexican sour gherkin & thyme plants over here on GrowStuff because I'm seeking some advice. So if you have any, I'm happy to hear it!

Future Plans
--Move thyme to a pot.
--Plant scarlet runner bean seeds directly into pot & place outside with trellis. These grow so well that no starter time-period is needed in the black plastic holders.
--Break off two baby spider plants & start them in their own pots.

I still feel very much like a novice with regard to plants. I'm not sure how to cultivate them, a little scared to eat them (need to get over this with the lettuce, I think!), etc.
BUT, I still think I'm doing a way better job than last year.

Growstuff.org is now in "soft launch." As a non-tech person, I'm led to believe that means, "we're not totally done yet!"
It's fun to be on a new site! The forums where people discuss the website itself are very friendly and helpful. I am confident that once I have plants around, I'll be able to ask questions about really basic things (idk what it means when something "goes to seed," for example, stuff like that), & people won't laugh at me, I don't think!

While you cannot yet add people as friends, the # of users is still pretty low, so it's easy to find other people's accounts under the "Members" tab. I am ribbonknight there.
I am a little sad that I can't add my non-food crops/plants (yet). So far, I've only been successful in maintaining non-food plants, like my spider plants & my rabbit foot fern and my peace lily.
During the summer, too, my red runner bean plant last year was my most successful in terms of how big it got/how long it stayed alive/how pretty the blooms were. But it literally only produced one bean.

I'd like to grow some flowers and other non-food plants on my balcony this year, if possible. I want to talk about my non-food plants, too. BUT. That is why I have this Dreamwidth blog, I suppose.
Anyway. Growstuff still seems like it will be valuable.

I'd like to do an inventory of the seeds I still have in my closet & blog about them here.

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I'd like to link to an article with a pretty banal headline ("Pope Francis doesn't represent all Catholics"), but I ended up feeling motivated & proud by the end.
I'd like to quote it for my own posterity. & preface it with...I really do understand why people do leave/have left the Catholic Church/Christianity/organized religion, in general. I don't mean to quote it to chide or shame other people, but rather sort of as a summation of why I stay. (Or how I wish I behaved - I haven't been "active" in a way I feel good about since high school, when we shook up our local parish at least a little bit. I would like to do that again.)

Since then, the story of the church has been punctuated by people who consulted their conscience first and their popes later. Francis of Assisi assembled his community of barefoot wanderers before going to Pope Innocent III to seek approval. In more recent times, Dorothy Day didn’t need a pope’s permission before opening a house of hospitality for the poor and resistance against war. The Community of Sant’Egidio, founded in Italy in the late 1960s, has fought HIV/AIDS and negotiated peace treaties around the world on its own terms. Yet, in honor of this witness, Benedict XVI made a habit of visiting Sant’Egidio’s ministries in Rome. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is seeking Dorothy Day’s cause for sainthood. And now, almost eight hundred years after Francis’ death, a pope has named himself after him.

Each of these Catholic heroes had a certain respect for the papacy, but they didn’t let that get in the way of living out the gospel for themselves. They took inspiration from the words of church authorities, but more importantly they took action on their own—in creative, authentic, and Christian fashion. “In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit,” Cardinal John Newman said more than a century ago. If what we expect from the church is what we expect from the aged and insulated man who happens to hold the office of Peter, there is little reason to expect much.

...

What the church needs is more committed and courageous souls in it, not fewer. It needs souls who are too busy organizing communities of radical living and prayer, and working for justice among the oppressed, and composing new hymns, to worry all that much about whom the Spirit and the cardinals might choose as pope. It needs souls willing to undertake new forms of thought and action capable of making what Catholics see as God’s good news a reality in our time—forms that will influence and inspire popes of the future, even if the present ones don’t yet get it.

Uhh, so I got an iPhone.

Now that I have Instagram, I took some pictures of the fucking plants I keep blogging about.

A decent shot of the red runner bean plant.

The drawer! After deciding to let things die & not watering it for two days, the plants are starting to die. *sad*

The plants I'm keeping (in addition to the red runner bean plant)

I've been frustrated with the plants lately.

I bought two different kinds of lettuce from a greenhouse on Sunday. They are already quite droopy, even though I've been keeping one of them inside and water them both every day.

I'd like to be able to plant them in my drawer, but I don't have enough plants to fill the drawer at the moment. The shoots of plants inside the tp tubes are small and weak - arugula, some flowers, sage, I don't remember what else. They're tiny and ineffectual.
The grown-up plants for sale at places like the Co-Op are almost exclusively tomato and pepper plants. I can't eat tomatoes or peppers, so I don't have much interest in growing them.
Maybe I'll just buy pretty flowers to fill up the rest of the box, and say to hell with growing/expecting to harvest food.

So I've bought a few plants that are more grown-up: a basil plant, which is doing pretty nicely. The one I bought was one of those in a degradable "pot." As instructed by the plastic on the pot, I ripped most of the pot off without tearing any roots, and left bits of it inside of the actual terra cotta post. These leftover degradable pot chunks don't seem to be degrading at all, so I'm worried I shouldn't have used them, or messed it up somehow.
When I bought lettuce on Sunday, I also bought some herbs to put into a strawberry pot: oregano, chives, lavender, thyme, and rosemary. I'm scared that I totally killed all of the herbs just from wrestling them all into the pot. They're still alive for now, but I am unconvinced they'll stay that way.

The only plants that I sprouted from seed in toilet paper tube rolls that have made it out of the tube are my red runner bean plants. I've put them in a pot and they've been climbing on a trellis that my parents bought for me. The mid-section of the vines' leaves all like, burned and fell off. I hadn't realized that the right side of my balcony caught the heat coming out of my air conditioner. I've since moved the plant to the other side of the balcony, but the mid-section/bottom has yet to re-grow. Since this plant grows so well, I stuck two new seeds into the pot, and we'll see if new red runner bean plants can fill in the sucky part.
In the meantime, the top of the plant is healthy and flowering.

Smaller plants that are still alive: small ivy that I bought from the co-op in the early spring or maybe last fall. There's only a single ivy guy left. Tied to a Hello Kitty pencil, it's not growing or getting any bigger, but it's alive.
Irish moss from Hy-Vee keeps doing its thing. It's pretty, but not exciting.
Spider plant (grown from when it fit into my palm; a gift from a friend) is doing okay, and still has its spawn hanging from a long shoot. I guess I should detach and pot its baby, to have another plant, :p

I hate stepping out on to the balcony because there seem to be spider webs EVERYWHERE. Bugs seem to enjoy congregating on my screen door, so it's always a fumble to open/close it as quickly as possible while juggling two glasses of water.

At the moment, things are very UGH.

Wisconsin typically has a late date for "last-frost," so I haven't planted anything yet, with the exception of micro-greens.

I planted these in a fit of rage last Thursday, loosely following this blog post as a guide.
My containers were plastic ~5x5" take-out containers from the hospital cafeteria I frequent while at work. I cut each clamshell in half, and used the top-half to catch water.
I created 5 holes in each bottom by repeatedly shoving a nail through them.
Filled the holey half of the container with dirt after setting it into the "water collection" half. Attempted to evenly distribute the entire seed packet on the dirt, and then sprinkled dirt on top of the seeds.

I used two different types of lettuce/greens seed, one entire packet in each one. I had bought the seeds on sale at Farm & Fleet.
The packet of Japanese greens had 1g of seeds. These looked kind of sparse when fully grown.
The packet of lettuce had 3g of seeds. These filled the entire container until it looked overflowing when fully grown.
I watered the trays every day, and set them in front of my sunny window/door.
I saw tiny sprouts beginning on Monday. I harvested for the first time Thursday morning, although I probably could have done so on Wednesday.

This was a great thing for me to do as a beginner because the effort was minimal, and the gratification was almost instant.
If you're impatient to start growing things and live somewhere with a late last-frost date like me, I recommend them!

I ate some on a half-sandwich today, and I'm sure they'd go fine in a salad. Unsure what else a person would use microgreens for.
Our co-op sells sprouts year-round, which I have bought & eaten in the past. I think they cost about $4, although I can't remember. Assuming a packet of seeds would cost $2 at the upper-end, growing these myself saves me $2 from the store.
I guess it would make the most sense to start one container, and then start a second container a week later, when you begin harvesting from the first container. Then, the supply would be endless! Of course, if you tire of foods easily, that might not be recommended.

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Other plant progress:
It's been unseasonably warm here this past week. Each afternoon, it gets up around 80 degrees.
I've begun the process of "hardening off" the potted plants I already own: a spider plant, African violet, a weak-looking but stubborn ivy, and some Irish moss.
It's too cold to set the plants out in the mornings (~45 degrees), but I set them out as soon as I get home from work, and leave them in 75-degree weather for 3-4 hours. The spider plant especially seems to like this, and I think I'm having some success in reviving the African violet. I've been trying to be better about watering them. It's easier to remember since the sprouts have to be watered each day.

Etc.
I have no furniture for my deck, so for now these relatively small plants just get set on the floor of the balcony.
What do you guys set your plants on outside? Plastic furniture? Tables, or some kind of shelves? Where do you buy them? What are they made out of?

I'd like something to set plants on indoors, too. Right now the microgreens/etc. just get set on the floor in front of my window/door. I'd prefer them on some kind of shelf so that it's easier to clean (vacuum up spilled dirt granules). I've had my eye out for such a shelf for a while now, but haven't found one (except for the one I found three years ago, which holds my linens in the bathroom ever since I moved into this apartment).

I'm annoyed that my apartment complex landlord people are painting the floors of the balconies. Right now they're unfinished/unpainted, well-weathered wood. They're painting the wood a burgundy color. Won't this attract a lot of heat??

One of my resolutions after visiting Japan for the second time in 2012 was to grow more plants. In Japan, lots of houses/apartments don't have yards, but people still had potted flowers/vegetables/herbs all over the place, and they were beautiful & I loved walking past them.

I bought a bunch of plants when I came back in July, but most of them have since died.
At the moment I have a fading African violet, an almost!dead but then revived ivy (which looks more like a sickly baby tree at the moment), and a robust spider plant. I got the spider plant as a cutting from one of my friend's spider plants, so I take a lot of pride in that one. It's even spawned a baby spider plant, which I hope to break off and start in its own pot once it gets warmer outside!


What I want:
--I'm not so ambitious as to plan to grow all of my own vegetables herbs, or etc. It would be neat to eat things from my own garden, but it's not a necessity. The cost of growing/maintaining plants needn't be less than the money I save by eating food I've grown.
--"Useless" plants that are pleasing to the eye are fine with me, too.
--I'll ignore advice about tomato and pepper plants for now. At the moment, I can't eat them. If it turns out that I can later in the season, I'll buy plants that's already started.
--I would like to try growing some plants from seed. But I recognize that this can be especially frustrating for beginners, so I'm okay with buying some plants that are already started, too.
--Assume that my budget is fairly liberal, but I'm not going drop like, $50 on a single plant (is that possible??). Thus far, I think all plants that I own have cost me less than $5. If I can re-use common household items like food containers, I would like to. But I don't mind buying pots if I need more than the few hand-sized ones I've got.

Internet resources I'm planning to start toying with right now:
This post about using toilet rolls as seed starters.
This PDF of a seed-starting plan so I know when to start growing shit.

Specs of my growing environment:
Inside: I have a sliding door/window that floods my apartment with light. I keep my three plants on top of a bookshelf next to the top of the door/window. The floor in front of the door/window is bare. I don't have a shelf or anything to set plants on, at the moment.
When it's not freezing, I like to set the plants outside.

Outside: North-facing balcony, measuring at dimensions forthcoming [in August, I'll be moving to a different apartment, and the balcony dimensions may increase.]
--The balcony has a guard rail. The balcony also has three wide beams in its "ceiling," supporting the floor of the balcony above me. With effort & assistance, I could probably hang some stuff from these beams.
--Birds like to nest on top of the beams. There's still an empty bird's nest there from last summer.
--The bottom of the balcony has slotted wood planks. There are gaps between each wood slot, & a balcony down below mine. So I have to be careful not to spill dirt/etc. down below! I do live next to a bike path & fields, though, so I could easily plant stuff on a ground/etc.
--I live in Wisconsin, so we're still a ways away from being able to set plants outside. This past Friday, for example, we had a blizzard.

Starting questions:
I think that at the moment, most of what I'm looking for is really basic advice, like what types of plants are fun to grow; do you use fertilizer and what kind; is it good to start plants growing inside before I set them outside; advice for frequency of watering, etc. I will take any advice!

ETA: Also desperately seeking advice on how to know when to re-pot plants.

I bought another jade plant today, at the Farmer's Market. Now, I have two jade plants, English ivy, and a pink polka dot plant. Oh, and my limp lucky bamboo, which seems to be doing better with increased water quality. They are still alive, although now I need to purchase a couple more pots. Maybe I'll do it this weekend, and bring one of my sister's kids with me.

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Also, I'm dividing my Geek.Kon posts into lots of mini-posts so that eventually, it will all be up here.

The bookmark I bought Sunday was beautiful, and based on this print.

Yesterday's Katara bookmark was from this print, and the Sailor Moon was this one.

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I want to finish the Romeo x Juliet anime (for reals this time!), because the idea of a woman with a sword and a man with flowers is so appealing to me (See: icon). There was an inordinate amount of randomly placed sentimentalism on behalf of Romeo in about episode 13 or something, which was the point where I said, "Yeah, I'm so done with this show." BUT, I keep remembering how much I loved the show's setup, and I'd like to see it through. I WILL DO IT!