Oh I forgot to mention this in a while, but the Juneberry is doing its name honor, there's a good chunk of berries right now! very tasty too. Like Blueberries but a bit more... vanilla-y? idek. We actually caught them going ripe a bit late some of them have dried on the bush, oops xP
Holy cow, a sudden hailstorm just put holes in the leaves out most of my plants O.o the zucchini and the bottle gourd look like they've been shredded
My tomato plants! And bonus monk's cress. I neglected to repot the stuff in the small greenhouse, need to replant those. Whoops. I need to extend my bamboo stick tomato supports.
The back corner of our garden looks magical and apparently likes the amount of rain we're getting a lot more than me
We have had a TON of raspberries this year! I entirely blame the fact that last year I was foolish enough to think I could control the patch and tore up everything I could reach - raspberry is one of those things that if you challenge it thusly it goes 'HAHAHA PUNY MAMMAL YOU DARE TO THINK YOU HAVE MASTERY???' It's eaten the rosemary and the lavender. It's eaten the onion rows - I know they're in there somewhere, but I'll have to go at it with shears if I want any albums by autumn. It's eaten the horseradish. It's definitely winning the turf war against the peppermint. I repeat, it's outgrowing freaking MINT. On the plus side, lots of delicious fruit that tastes like sherbet and sunlight. Also the gooseberry seems to be doing well for a change - I guess raspberry-sempai is finally making good on that protection racket. We've also got our usual beans and zucchini growing, but they all seem weirdly behind this year and I'm a little worried about veggie prospects :/
Finally got some pictures of my balcony! From left to right : one of my "goop method" tomato experiments, lemon cucumber, moonflower Left to right here: zucchini, wildflower mix in a hanging basket, bottle gourd, pink heirloom tomato experiment, "salad slicer" cucumber, yellow heirloom tomato experiment another moonflower I've also got lavender, tiny tim tomatoes (which are about to give me fruit I'm stoked) a couple more tomatoes that were out of the frame, some mint, and a bitty rhododendron
I lost spoons and forgot about watering the garden for about a week (or...going outside at all, really) and the end result is that most of the herbs are dead, the edible flowers are dead (but they were on their way out anyways, I should've trimmed them), the peas look downright dusty, and the beans are hanging on by their fingernails. The raspberry and blueberries both looked obnoxiously fine by the time I mustered up the spoons to get back on schedule with watering, and the tomatoes were a bit wilted but have finally recovered from earlier overwatering and underfeeding enough that they're starting to look like they're getting ready to produce flowers; they're certainly bigger and taller, and I suspect any tomatoes I get are going to show up in September or October (if I get any at all). The corn has some crispy leaves, but otherwise looks okay. I think it's starting to produce ears? That or I've been nurturing some mutant grass this whole time; there's long bits of what look like oversized grass seed stem bits, coloured purple, tucked away in the leaves. Something's been tipping over the dead herb pots, and the rest of the garden (the stuff I haven't been specifically watering) is pretty crispy at this point; the grass is that yellow-beige you get when it's pretty much completely dead, and it crunches when I walk across it. I've been emptying whatever's left in the watering can when I'm done with the stuff that's still alive in containers out onto the lawn - not trying to revive it, that's a bit beyond what I have spoons for and I honestly don't care enough; I'm just trying to get the space damp enough that it's not a fire hazard.
I checked, and the corn's definitely starting to produce ears. From the looks of it, I'm getting at least two ears of corn in total, hopefully fully-developed ones? And I've futzed with the rest and tried to hand-pollinate and will be trying a bit more tomorrow and the next day and...basically, until it looks like the corn's done producing pollen. One basket of tomatoes has a few tiny flowers on one plant. Fingers crossed for a few tomatoes out of that. I'm planning on pulling out the beans and peas tomorrow, and looking over the packets I've got to see what I can plant that'd have any time to grow before autumn hits. I want to try and restart my was-probably-a-geranium, it died hard after something tipped it over, and I'm considering restarting some of the herbs. (The dill dying was a mercy, it'd gotten tall af and was going to seed. The basil and parsley haven't died, but the basil also seems Smol.)
I found a very neglected peace lily at work and brought it home to try and bring it around. Any suggestions would be great. I've already repotted it and I think it might have root rot.
My spider plant has thrived in its regular shady spot on the living room dresser all year, but is now very pale and leggy and also is very lax in habit. Should I be moving it closer to the window - winter days tend to be very dark and short - or is this symptom of being pot bound? I noticed there's a lot of thick roots beginning to show in the soil. I've been considering a self-watering system like Lechuza-PON to make sure I'm not neglecting plants (bad memory, easily sidetracked), any experience with these?
Welll, without seeing a pic I can't be sure of your spider's condition, but generally moving plants closer to the window in winter is a good thing, yeah. All of my houseplants live exclusively against my window, and that includes my own massive SP, Tiamat, Mother of a Thousand Young. Also yes, if you can see roots in the top of the pot - and the soil itself feels pretty solid - that can be an indication your plant in potbound. Spider Plants can happily thrive on being potbound, however, so if you want to wait until spring to repot it it certainly won't mind! But if you do repot it, remember - SPIDER PLANTS IN PLASTIC POTS ONLY. They have super hench roots and so have a bad habit of breaking terracotta/clay pots if they're left in them long enough to get antsy :P EDIT: And also, a cheaper option to self-watering is to just put reminders on your phone? I'm home all the time so I usually water regularly, but I have an alarm set every thursday to remind me in case I've neglected them :)
The living room window is unfortunately located right above the radiator which is a bad location for a plant. I have tried reminders, but I have a bad habit of just dismissing them, especially if I'm kind of sleepy. I'll give it another shot, though. Sometimes I catch the cat having a sly nibble too, which probably doesn't help. (I very famously killed a spider plant stone dead within 2 weeks while living in college halls, no one seemed to know how I did it given spider plants' resilience to most things. In my defence that college was a Bad Time and I remember very little of it.)
It does look like it's struggling a little, but it doesn't look particularly light-starved to me. If you've got a table or something that's a little closer to the window than the dresser it's already on it would appreciate it. And generally as long as the leaves aren't touching the radiator it should be fine; you just need to water it more often to balance out the drying effect it would have on the soil. (Spider plants like it if you leave their water in the watering can overnight, so it's at least somewhat dechlorinated.) Can you set your reminders for a time of day when you know you're likely to be already up and about? (Also, man, I should take pics of my houseplants. Tiamat in particular, she's huge and old compared to your baby :P )
I'll try moving it to the top of the media cabinet then, and it would probably be good if I could set my reminder for a day when I've got a coffee break scheduled mid-afternoon. I always stand my water anyway since I use it for misting the snail habitat too. Thanks for the advice! (Post plant pics, I love seeing other people's gardening skills.)
Took some pics of my houseplant collection finally! In order - group photo, with everyone on my windowsill (I say windowsill, but it's actually the top of some shelves and my chest of drawers up against my bedroom window) Then Tiamat, my spider plant, as promised! She'd be around five to seven years old at this point, and she has more babies than I ever know what to do with. I keep feeling like I should split her up when I new repot, but I couldn't bear to lose the other half, since I have no room for two pots of that size ^^;;; (Also I don't have any friends who share my green thumb and I could trust to give a new home.) This is a blurry cryptid photo of my aloe vera, Carlos, who is basically grown into that shelf and never leaves, lol. He's older than Tiamat, I thiiiink - I remember getting him when I still regularly went to cosplay meets in the city, so that might be as much as a decade old? (Also note the super cheap dollar store fertilizer on the shelf above him - that's where I keep all my spare bits for my little forest XDD) This is both the youngest and tallest member of my (permanent) collection - a yearling starfruit who I grew from seed at the start of 2017. He's doing pretty well, but he's probably not going to be named until he stops looking so worryingly leggy ^^;;; The Tangle, aka what happens when you want some kind of hanging plant in your window but don't have much in the way of money. I turned an old mason jar into a hanging pot with a great deal of wire, then added some black-eyed susan (Thunbergia alata) seeds and stuck in a branch in case they needed some extra support besides the wire. It's technically younger than the strafruit, but I'm gonna have to at the very least trim it vigorously come springtime because it didn't flower as much as I would have liked and I suspect it's due to overcrowding. The stuff grows so fast it would be no hardship to have to start again from scratch, anway. Moving on, I have Malik, my prayer plant. I really really love the painted look leaves so much, and he puts out the occasion tiny lilac-coloured blossom, too. Out of my main three, he's the most junior at about two or three years old, but I almost love him more than the other two, because he's heliotropic and looks as sad on dark days as I do XDD (He's partially trained against the bookshelf on that side, and he's grown through the lattice to give my natural history items and plastic animals there a wonderful, jungle-y look :D ) (Oh, and here's Malik 2.0, who happened because I was trimming Malik the elder and accidentally snipped off a viable cutting. I impulse stuck him in some water to see what would happen, and after six months or so he's doing really well as his own plant!) In front of Malik is Fiona, my christmas cactus. She's more of a halloween cactus and tends to flower in late october to mid november, depending on her mood. I'm gonna have to repot her soon - when I last did so it was when I first got her at about a third of her current size - but the pot she's in right now is one I made myself, as an early ceramics project. It has abyssal fish all round it :D And last but not least, my golden pothos, who I bought as a seedling at my local reptile store when I was picking up food for Syd. I hear a lot about how fast-growing pothos plants are, and I mean he's definitely tripled in size in the last eight months or so, but compared to how The Tangle shot up he's small beans. Maybe he'll pick up more when the weather improves :) (Also, he's as yet nameless so suggestions are always welcome :P )
