This and that

We've made our monthly groceryshopping and cleaned the entire first floor. I shouldn't be surprised that I don't have strength enough to water the gardens. After all I've got a flu and have less strength than I usually have. But it irks me, it really do, since I can see that all plants are thirsty. Tomorrow I'll take another day to just clean up and make everything easy and fun to care for.

As for my harvests I can now take 100g (3.53 ounces) tomatoes every other or third day. I've only harvest cuttings once, and that was 40g (1.41 ounces) which may sound little, but it filled a litre (1/3 gallon) so I got enough for a (small) family sized sallad anyway.

Last but not least; we may not have won the Eurovision Song Contest, but a swede won best in show at Chelsea Flower Show. Ulf Nordfjell designed the Daily Telegraph Garden at the show, and you can see it on the first picture here. Thing is, how should I celebrate this? Hmmm... a cup of herbal tea and a sandwhich, I think. Tallyho!

Indoor Gardener the Next Generation

While I was away on Big And Important Business in Stockholm the entire day the son watered the plants with his bath water.

They've started to drink

I went up at half past five this morning to water my plants. I used seven liters (two gallons) and emptied all my bufferts. Deary me, it's only April...

Lifelines

Rats! Today I took a quick look on a job I was planning to apply for, and realised that the deadline was today. Instead of building stuff for my worms I wrote CVs and personalised letters and clicked through web forms.

Days like this comes every now and then, so what do you do if you keep your entire garden indoors? Eventhough I'm trying to devise this system to be as lowmaintenance as possible I currently have to check up on my plants and water them once a day. This is why I've put up a few lifelines.

The first one is a recycled plasticbottle in my fridge labled "diluted worm pee" (gross, I know, but at least I don't mix it up with something edible). Whenever I have access to "worm pee" (the fluid that pours from the bottom of the vermicompost) I mix a tad into the water when I'm watering the plants (one half deciliter of fluid to fifteen deciliter of water). Of course I don't do this when I have Importent Things to Handle (tm). In these situations it's good to have some premixed solution to pour over the tomatoes, the hugriest plants in my 'garden'. Perhaps it's not good to chock the roots with cold water, but the plants haven't complained so far.

The second lifeline is to leave the watering can at least half full. This way I can just grabb it and rescue a plant that's started wiltering. In this case I can congratulate myself on using room tempered water.

The last life line is our own water carafe in the kitchen. The water is hardly demineralised, but it works when the ever thirsty basils are drooping. I guess they're happy we've not fallen for the trend with carbonated water.

Oh, and I've joined Sparkpeople to loose weight. It's a pretty fun program actually, easy to handle and completely free. Yesterday when I weighed myself I was clocking in at 88 kilos (194 pound), my aim is 60 kilos (132 pound) by february 2010.

Pondering water

A good thing about being ill is the time for thinking you get. Right now my thoughts circles around effectivisation of watering, planting, nutrition - well effectivisation of everything. Partly because this will give me more time to heal, partly because I'd appreciate some time off even when I'm healthy.

Watering steals most of my time and efforts. A nordic company (Gardena) sells a drip irrigation system that looks nice. (Sorry about the swedish link - this company do only have websites for their customers in the nordic countries, which means I could choose between swedish, norwegian and danish. I hope you have similar systems.)

And expensive.

I could start to use selfwatering containers again, or perhaps build my own drip irrigation system. Hmmmm... that last things speaks to my inner gadgeteer, I think I'll ponder this some more. Like I said, I have the time for it.