How my garden grows
(This is actually a rather delayed report -- the pictures are from last weekend, so everything except the tomato plant is slightly bigger now, and the tomato plant is way freakin' hugely bigger.)
So I have plants! And a worm bin! And scary, scary vampire mint.
First, the overview. From back to front, left row first:
* "Sweet 100" cherry tomato plant
* rosemary
* parsley
* basil
* Bruce, a very small blue spruce, and the menagerie he has invited to share his pot (mostly moss, but there's something that looks suspiciously oak-like in there too)
* Sparky, last year's Christmas tree, who was painted blue by the store and has, somewhat surprisingly, neither recovered from nor died of this condition; there is a tiny little bit of new growth right at the top, which can be identified by the way it looks yellow (since it was never painted blue)
The tomato plant was about as tall when purchased as the basil is in this picture; it grew quickly for a while, then tripled in size while we were away in Minneapolis. Now it's... bigger.
Here are the first tomatoes. I couldn't find this clump when I went to look just now, because it's dark and the plant's grown enough that it looks quite different, so I'm not sure how much bigger the tomatoes have gotten in the last week. Not much, anyway.
The worm bin is downstairs, in the shade. It is, as you can see, an opaque container. The lid there is particularly opaque, and is on the bin at all times except when I'm adding stuff or taking pictures. Despite this, the abandoned and discarded mint is (a) flourishing and (b) bright green, despite the total absence of light. I am afraid of it.
Other than the vampire mint, the worm bin contains a few redworms, which I put there, and a whole lot of opportunistic scavenging creatures. However, they all seem to be relatively well-behaved scavenging creatures, which stay neatly in the worm bin and don't smell bad, so they can stay.
Since this picture was taken, I've added more bedding and attempted to adjust the pH; I don't seem to have killed everything, but I think it's moister in there now than it should be. The drain holes in the bottom might be clogged. Perhaps I will leave the lid off for a while tomorrow and see if evaporation helps. (I will feel particularly bad if the things-that-looked-like-worm-egg-cases [hey, they're visible in the photo (sort of): the white specks on the lower half of the lid] that were there earlier and aren't there now were worm egg cases and are now dead of too much water, because I would very much like the worms to breed so that they can eat more stuff.)
So I have plants! And a worm bin! And scary, scary vampire mint.
First, the overview. From back to front, left row first:
* "Sweet 100" cherry tomato plant
* rosemary
* parsley
* basil
* Bruce, a very small blue spruce, and the menagerie he has invited to share his pot (mostly moss, but there's something that looks suspiciously oak-like in there too)
* Sparky, last year's Christmas tree, who was painted blue by the store and has, somewhat surprisingly, neither recovered from nor died of this condition; there is a tiny little bit of new growth right at the top, which can be identified by the way it looks yellow (since it was never painted blue)
The tomato plant was about as tall when purchased as the basil is in this picture; it grew quickly for a while, then tripled in size while we were away in Minneapolis. Now it's... bigger.
Here are the first tomatoes. I couldn't find this clump when I went to look just now, because it's dark and the plant's grown enough that it looks quite different, so I'm not sure how much bigger the tomatoes have gotten in the last week. Not much, anyway.
The worm bin is downstairs, in the shade. It is, as you can see, an opaque container. The lid there is particularly opaque, and is on the bin at all times except when I'm adding stuff or taking pictures. Despite this, the abandoned and discarded mint is (a) flourishing and (b) bright green, despite the total absence of light. I am afraid of it.
Other than the vampire mint, the worm bin contains a few redworms, which I put there, and a whole lot of opportunistic scavenging creatures. However, they all seem to be relatively well-behaved scavenging creatures, which stay neatly in the worm bin and don't smell bad, so they can stay.
Since this picture was taken, I've added more bedding and attempted to adjust the pH; I don't seem to have killed everything, but I think it's moister in there now than it should be. The drain holes in the bottom might be clogged. Perhaps I will leave the lid off for a while tomorrow and see if evaporation helps. (I will feel particularly bad if the things-that-looked-like-worm-egg-cases [hey, they're visible in the photo (sort of): the white specks on the lower half of the lid] that were there earlier and aren't there now were worm egg cases and are now dead of too much water, because I would very much like the worms to breed so that they can eat more stuff.)