Order in a book

I've introduced order in my gardens. Order in the form of a book with cloth binders. The classic thing is supposed to be black oil cloth but I couldn't resist colour coding mine to my study (no matter how hard I try I can't get rid of my inner romantic). In this book I keep track on important things like when I sow my seeds, in what and where. It's not for a scientific study of indoor cultivation, rather a method to remember what's happening.

Untill now I've kept my records on the backside of used envelopes and put the notes on 'good places'. Now I have gardening facts strewn around the house and I have no idea of which ones that really are important and which ones I can toss. You may remember that some of them doesn't even have a proper date on them. It's a relief to finally have everything in one place.

Thus my tip for this time is to buy a book for the gardening records. Make sure it's a good quality notebook and that the binders are tough. When it comes to books quality are relatively cheap so don't be overly thrifty. Your notebook will lay around soil, pots and spades, and may even be treated with a shower from time to time. And you'll want to keep it and read it long after you've written the last line. If you buy a cheap notebook you'll soon have a worse loose leaf system than my recycled envelopes (unfortunately this happened to my first kitchen notebook - a cheap but pretty thing I bought and recorded the recipes I invented when I first lived on my own).

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You may have noted that I've updated irregularly for the last weeks. I've had a fortyeight hour life to a twentyfour hour day. The good news is that it seems like everything is clearing up (do keep your fingers crossed, please). To declutter my life I've decided to keep down the updates on Indoor Gardener for a three week period. Untill 18th March I'll be updating Mondays, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.

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And a small digression; Since I can't keep from surfing different webaps calculating your ecological footprint I've promised not to fly (it's easy right now; I have no money). Boat and train are my only means of travel. Yupp. But even when I did fly I stayed away from RyanAir because of their dubious personnel policies. After reading this article I've gotten yet another reason to avoid the company.

Ryanair: "Lunatic bloggers can keep the blogosphere"

Tired friday

Tired blogger in rocking chair. This was actually the best picture in the batch - I'm not photogenique...

Today I stacked my library books together and brought them back to their home. Since I've decided to stay on good terms with this magnificent institution I payed my late fees too. Before me in the line was an old lady beside herself with shame since she had to pay ten swedish kronas ($1,64 / GB£ 0,82 / AUD 1,75). I payed more than ten times that without even blinking. My only excuse for having no shame is that I hope they'll buy more books for my money (this is not the first time I'm late, and it won't be the last either).

I'm not sure if carrying heavy loads of books is to blame, but I've been pretty tired ever since. My plant's been given the basic care and nothing more - unless you count the plans I made for next replanting round. To at least see some work I googled "gardening". I expected a wild hit to be the first, ie. a company that sold something along the lines of 'adult garden gnomes' amassing a lot of hits while not being of more than theoretical interest to me (ahem). But what I got was a "spot on!" hit with the additional thought "THEY should know". Videos, lots of facts and this lovely british accent.

BBC Gardening

In the middle of the right column you now find some commentary rules. I've added them to avoid flame wars as well as unneccesary spam.

Mineral deficiencies - a homepage

Mineral deficiency. No one wants that - it weakens the plant and makes it vulnerable to other diseases and pests. If you grow stuff in containers or hydrocultures it's particurlary important to be able to diagnose it, since you can't count on Mother Earth to provide what's needed via the soil. And since Mother Earth sometimes can be pretty tight-fisted I think we all can benefit from this homepage

Color Pictures of Mineral Deficiencies in Plants

Thanks to Parkettmaken (the Indoor Gardener Hubby) who found the link!

That's MY blog!

This spring I reviewed a new swedish gardening/interior design magazine called Rosie. I did subscribe to it too, since I liked it. Now, a few days ago the last issue arrived. I flip through it in that semiconsiuos stage the parent of a toddler experience in the evening. Today I finally read the copy. To be honest I had a plan to plug my blog by sending a letter to the editor and include my url in the text.

Someone else had already done that. (Do read her blog if you know swedish.)

"Dang." I thought and was about to go on with my chores when this huge, praising citation printed in orange on the letters page caught my eye. There was a reference, with url, to Parkettodlaren (the swedish version of Indoor Gardener)!

Now I'll lean back and enjoy my fifteen minutes of fame before I go back to my plants. For you I'll sample my tips for the season, enjoy!

• Extra light
  
• Selfwatering containers
  
• Chopped garlic on the soil to scare away the sciriadae
  
• Common purslane survives most mishaps and you can harvest it for a long period of time.
  
• Sprouts (if you are not oversensitive to them - I am, but the sprouts are in general a great indoor crop)
  

(You can buy the picture as a poster or on a mug in my Cafe Press shop btw.)

Surfharvest1

Yes, I have been surfing before, but I was more of maturing the websites in my bookmarks collection. Now I have taken time to read some of them carefully, and have even added some new. To be able to pick out the best I rethought my motif to do this experiment. The first requirement is that there's as little trouble as possible. "Trouble" in this case is to many new and complicated procedures in the growing method, too complicated containers and soils.

Hm, perhaps I should rephrase that in a positive way. Indoor vegetable gardening should be easy, leaning to the most on well known methods and should be done with stuff you can find at your home.

This rule kind of disqualified this site, Greenpinelane, were indoor gardening using LEDlights is recorded. It's hard on the eyes too, but I included it anyway, because it's a comforting fact that you can grow in such an advanced way using so simple materials. And who knows; the day we actually buy that castle sized flat downtown (posh in Sweden) I might single one room out for LEDlight cultivations.

Container Vegetable Gardening is better. Someone who really knows something about cultivation have written a short text(yes, short. You don't know how loooooooong things like this can become) about growing vegetables in containers. This is mainly for beginners, but an experienced beginner like me have use for it too, as a cheating note on what you 'should' know. I value the table at the bottom most, where you can see the size of container needed by different vegetables. (For my non-US readers; it's an US gallon ie ~3.8 litres, and an inch meassures roughly 2.5 centimeters.)

The last site is a favourite. Container Gardening: Plant and Grow Tomatoes in a Small Space for Healthy, Nutritious Meals. I may not be a fan of tomatoes, but this site gives me some tips on high producing kinds - highly sought after by an indoor gardener. Except for the fruits tomatoes are poisonous, so I think this is a plant for my future study.

Gardening blog fora in swedish (and english)

I actually mislaid a comment to my posts a few minutes ago. Ie. I published it and didnt't find it afterwards when I wanted to answer the question. Joppe asked if I knew any swedish web fora for swedish bloggers, since he (she?) hadn't found any. I decided to make a short post out of the answer instead.

There is one site that provides blog service and a forum for bloggers that is specifically for gardeners. It's called

Trädgårdsblogg & Gröna sidan
(the URL is http://www.tradgardsblogg.se)

I haven't checked it out much, so I don't know if there are any exchanging of adresses or if they have a directory for gardening blogs outside their own service, but this is the second place where I should go. (The name translates roughly to "Gardening blogs and green pages".)

The first place is

Odla.nu
(URL http://www.odla.nu)

Sweden's biggest gardener forum. They don't have a place for garden bloggers yet, but I have a feeling that many garden bloggers pay a visit there sooner or later, so I started a thread called "Trädgårdsblogg och utbyte av adresser" (transl: "gardening blogs and exchange of adresses"). (It's listed under "Småprat om trädgård", do pay a visit and jot down some lines about your blog if you have a swedish one.)

If you speak and write in english you should start your gardening blog surfing at

Garden Voices
(URL http://voices.gardenweb.com/)

Yes, I'm listed there (and honoured to be, too), and that's where I started when I was a fresh garden blogger (just a seedling so to speak). Lots of interesting gardening blogs to read.

And last, but not least, don't forget our first international gardening blog competition

Mouse & Trowel Awards
(URL http://www.inthegardenonline.com/mt/)

Back to the roots

This image is called "just off the turnip truck"
Photografer is Darwin Bell, you find more of his images here.

Since my added light projects proceeds in a very slow pace I spend the 'lost' time researching the crops I've bought. You've already seen the result twice, since I've published small articles on common purlsane and ice plant on this blog. Now it's time for the different roots. I like roots. They're nutricious, can be harvested early and stays fresh for a long time. On the other hand I wasn't so sure that I could learn something more about them. The tiger nut are indeed exotic to a swede, but the turnip seems common enough. And the carrot! Is there anything worth to add about the carrot?

I always do my research on the net, using Goooogle and the common swedish name of the plant. As soon as I find a reliable latin name I do a new search on that. This is the best way to find reliable sources. Because the net is littered by plant heads, romantics and wannabe herb gurus, and you need to distinguish between them and the reliables. Read the reliable ones first to have a solid base of knowledge when you go on to read the articles written by plant heads, romantics and wannabe herb gurus. These are often more fun, and may contain some grains of truth.

Indeed, there were quite a lot to say about both turnip and carrot. There's even a museum dedicated solely to this orange root - I'm not at all surprised that there are englishmen and women involved. I'll publish my collected efforts on this blog during the week.

Happy gardening!