Upstairs PLant Rack

The plants on the upstairs plant rack are doing well.  The ivy are growing all around the single light and thriving with the southern sunlight.

This spider plant was just one little surviving baby when I pinned it into the soil about this time last year.  It sure liked the fresh soil.  And I water my plants with aquarium water, so they get some mild natural fertilizer each time.  

I have some vague plan to attach an iron rod to the ceiling studs and hang plants from it where the sun will hit them.  I'll need to make or find a water catch tray below them though.

Light Stand

I have to have the light stand ready for seedlings in 3 weeks, so why not do it now?

I took everything off, organized stuff into piles. And kept everything not "plant-starting" or "plant-growing" off.  Most of the plants there were cuttings I rooted in December.  Waxy Hoyas,...

Some failed to root, but most did.  I took out the failed ones and combined the rooting ones into 6-packs.  That saved some space.  And I had some planters half-filled. so I planted more seeds to fill them.

When all was done, I had this...

Celery plants.  For the leaves in salads.  I love the slightly strong taste of them.  I snip a couple from each plant and they keep growing new leaves.

I discovered another new Petunia growing and flowering in a Waxy Hoya cel and separated it for transplanting.  BTW, a 1" putty knife works great for that.

I read that you can grow scallinon-like greens from the top of an onion.   So far, it is working...

I love the taste of endive lettuce.  These are floppy now, but will be sending up heartier leaves soon that I can cut and they will regrow.

The single Snake Plant I chopped up into pieces and repotted...  The pieces are all doing well.  There is some slight new growth.  The interesting question is what to do with 12 Snake Plants.  I'm thinking a row of them in a new-built wood frame on the deck rails come Summer.

Basement Cleaning

Here is a real "Before and After"!

At the end of the growing season, I've accumulated a lot of stuff "out-of-place".  Well, I get busy, you know?  So it was needing some work to get ready for the new planting season.  And amazingly, the new planting season starts in 3 weeks!

So, I had to get to work.  The clutter was bad. 

Even my light stand was clutterred!  It's the old rule of "any horizontal surface gets covered"...

After 2 days work, I had it down to this...

And to show I didn't just move stuff "out of sight", here is the other previously clutterred space...

That old refrigerator is my "root cellar".  I keep bulk veggies in it at 40-45F.  And my seeds are in the tray there too.

Next, I need to clear out and get my light stand ready to stat seedlings...

Freshwater Aquarium

I have had one type of aquarium or another since college when I built a 2 gallon aquarium from plastic sheets I found in the trash in my college dorm (and bought plastic cement to hold it together - a serious expense at the time)

My first REAL job was in the fish department at a department store in 1971.  I had the aquarium I built and needed a few fish for it.  I visited the nearest department store, and was angry that the tanks were dirty and had dead fish in them.  I complained to the person at the cash register (in those days, each department had its own cash register).

The person was the Department Manager.  A real slob, reflecting how he maintained the fish tanks.  He offerred me a job.  I took it (minimum wage was better than no wage, and I hated asking my parents for "spending money" while they were paying college tuition and board).

In a week, I had all the dead  fish removed (and accounted for, for inventory-reporting), tanks cleaned, and asked what to do next.  The Department Manager guy didn't care, but the part-time Assistant Manager was impressed.


It was a chain operation.  Back then, discount stores were called "department" stores because each "department" was a separate business renting space in it.  I bet you never knew THAT!

So the Regional Manager came along once a month (he had dozens of "fish departments" to oversee).  The assistant manager told him what I had been doing (that the department manager had not) and the Manager was fired, the Assistant went to Manager and I got nothing...  Huh?

So I upped my game.  There was one tall display case in the storage room, and I cleaned it up, set it at the entrance to the department, and set up breeding tanks.  One month it would be cherry barbs, another, fancy guppies, another, Siamese Fighting Fish.

I even found a 2 gallon brandy-snifter in the glasswares department and snuck it away to create a self-contained live plant and guppy "tank" that required no feeding of the fish or water changes (other than adding some distilled water occasionally).

The next time the Regional Manager came by, he announced they were closing the department.  But he offerred me the Manager job at one of their better departments in Cherry Hill New Jersey.  20% above minimum wage.

A 20% wage increase would have been great.  But I was still in college and had hopes for a better future.  I declined the offer.  You never know what changes such choices make.  For all I know, my career could have gone into retail sales and store management with company stocks and wealth.  But I stayed in college.

I mention all this because I still keep fish.  Watching them swim around endlessly is soothing.  It gives me something to be responsible for (as if the cats and house and yard weren't enough).  But you know what I mean.  It adds structure to the day.  And Ayla loves watching them move around.

So When I found a algea-like slime couting the bottom of the aqurium last year, I took the whole thing apart (moved the fish to a 10 gallon aquarium temporarily).   I cleaned the plastic plants.  I scooped out all the gravel.  I scrubbed the tank with a pad and then filled it with water out on the deck and added bleach to kill anything in it. 

Then I rinsed the tank several times, stirring up the gravel as I went.  Then I set it all up again and moved the fish back in.

That lasted 3 months.  The slime returned.

I repeated the process.

In December the slime returned.  It shouldn't have, so I did so research.  I learned my problem was "blue-green" algae.  And that the name was false.  It is a "cyano-bacteria", and bacteria is not "algae".  Bleach doesn't kill it. 

I found help at Petco.  There was a woman with a dog (a customer, I assumed) talking to a woman with a Petco uniform.  The usual fish expert was not there.  So I asked uniformed woman if the expert was there.  He wasn't, but she offerred to help.

I was doubtful.  Be sure to understand it was because she wasn't the fish expert that I doubted she could help.  I know about helping customers (spent 5 years in stores doing whatever I could to help), but expertise was needed here.  She had no idea what cyanobacteria was. 

But she was willing to help.  Unfortunately, I know how THAT goes.  The helpful clerk pulls bottles off the shelf and reads them to see if they mention the problem.  I appreciate the willingness to help, but I had done that already and with more experience.

But guess what?  The "customer with the dog" was actually the Regional Manager and knew EXACTLY what I was talking about!  She handed her dog (on a leash) to the clerk, and said I needed "Chemi-Clean" and walked directly to the spot on the shelf where it was stocked.

The spot on the shelf was empty...   But she said they had just gotten the weekly shipment of supplies in.  She went to the back and returned with a container of The Right Stuff!

$20!  Well, compared to cleaning the aquarium again, that was a bargain.  It is harmless to fish and plants.  You keep the water circulating without charcoal filters at high power (extra air bubblers) for 48 hours and then replace 20% of the water.  The cyano-bacteria is supposedly dead.  And the container has 10 doses in it (endless shelf-life apparently).

A week later, the aquarium looks clean.  Without the plants in the aquarium, I see I have more fish than I realized!  Some I knew of, of course (red-tailed shark, 2 corydoris catfish, 1 algae eater), but 11 serpae tetra and 3 tiger barbs.  I thought I had only 6 tetras.  I guess they hide well.

And, in the picture above, you see a small 10 gallon tank at the bottom.  That's where the 6 new tiger barbs are staying for a week while I make sure they don't bring home a disease.  The screen and brick on the top of that tank is to make sure the cats don't get too pawy at them.

The cloudy stuff in the center are air bubbles from a long strip bubbler...

I haven't added the plastic plants back in yet, but they seem clean.  BTW, that brown block above is a piece of petrified wood. 

I'll add them back soon.  But I'm thinking I should add some live plants.  That can wait, but it is on my list...BTW, that brown block

Starter Soil

I mix my own.  I use up a large trash barrel each year.  It works great for me!

Start with a sifter.  I made one 2'x2' of 2"x4" boards covered on the bottom with 1/4" hardware cloth (wire mesh). 

My formula is:
4 parts finished compost
2 parts peat moss
1 part vermiculite
1/2 part perlite

I have a large plastic bin that fits under the sifter.  I add scoops of each item into the sifter and rub it around (wearing heavy leather gloves).  When it is mostly gone and just unsiftable lumps left, I add the sifted material to the trash barrel and the unsifted material to a small bucket

After a 2nd load into the barrel, I stir it all around

Repeat, repeat, repeat...

When I'm done, I have a whole barrel of sifted starter soil and 1 bucket of peat clumps.  I pound that as best I can with a 4"x4"x4' post and toss it into the compost bin.

I re-use planting 6-pack cels, but I soak them in a mild bleach solution in the basement laundry tub and rinse them 3 times.  I have great germination, so no problem there. 

I also cut one one cell out of a 11"x22" flat for ease of watering.  There is always SOME plant I can get by with having 5 of, LOL!

So, this week's project is making more starter soil.

Gardening Organization

I love this time of year almost as much as the first harvest.  Planning is in my blood!

The catalogs arrive daily, but that doesn't matter.  Most are junky scammy ones.  I would mention names but I don't feel like getting arguements about them.  I'll just say that if you keep getting catalogs from places you never order from, those are probably them.  LOL!

The catalogs I like are Johnny's, Territorial, Victory, Selected Seeds, and Brent&Becky's.  Burpee's is good too, but I never end up ordering from them these days.

I have a SYSTEM for keeping seeds and deciding when to plant them inside and out.  My seeds are kept refrigerated in medical specimen vials I found cheap years ago.  They last years longer that way.  I number the vials on top and on the sides.

The tray was easy.  I drilled holes the size of the vial bottoms in a piece of plywood and glued another piece under it.  I'm going to build a better one with a 2nd board 1/2 way up (the current bottom holes are tight to hold the vials upright).  But the main point is that the seeds are all in one tray, sealed and refrigerated (in a basement refrigerator also used as a root cellar for potatoes and carrots and such).

I keep a list of the vial contents using Excel (for easy columns).  A part of it looks like this:

	SEEDLIST 2018
	VEGETABLES
VIAL	CROP	TYPE	ACQ YR
101	PAC CHOI	CHING-CHIANG	18
102	TOMATO	SWEET MILLION	17
103	TOMATO	SUPERNATURAL (ROOTSTOCK)	18
104	TOMATO	BRANDYWINE	17
105	TOMATO	PINEAPPLE	17
106	TOMATO	CHEROKEE PURPLE	16
107	TOMATO	STRIPED GERMAN	13
108	TOMATO	MOSKVITCH	13
109	TOMATO	GARDEN TREASURE	16
110	TOMATO	GARDEN GEM	16
111	CORN	ALLURE	16
112	CORN	ALLURE	16
113	CORN	ALLURE	16
114
115	LETTUCE	ROMAINE, RED MARSHALL	17
116	LETTUCE	NEVADA	17

I also keep index cards for each week of planting or transplanting, with notes...

The number in the upper right is the weeks before or after the average last frost date (April 15th here, but I round it to weekends for simplification.  A few days doesn't matter.  And, as you can see, I change the weeks sometimes.  I also have a set of cards counting backwards from the average FIRST frost date for Fall plantings.

I keep all the empty seed packets.  Sometimes there is good information, but it also tells me where I got the seeds from. 

Ancestry

I mentioned "not finding English DNA" in my recent test.  A friend pointed out that there IS no specific English DNA.  The English haven't been "English" long enough for that.  As Americans and Australians haven't.

Aw man, I should have realized that...  So I'm, 43% German and French because that's where the "English" came from.  And the 38% Scot and Welsh is the interesting part.  The minor parts Iberian and Middle East are probably from when the Moslems came across North Africa and conquored Spain and my Southern French ancestors inter-married. 

The Balkan part is still really interesting, though.