Mahli’s Musing

Monday was a good start as the seeds I ordered from Justseed, a UK seed company, arrived bringing me a seed abundance of mizuna, komatsuna, bicolored perilla and 2 varieties of alpine strawberries: Ali Baba and White Soul. The labeling is good, although the germination instruction could be more detailed. The seed quality was so [...]

Today the university’s botanical garden is holding a seedling market, along with free guided tours around the garden. As usual they have plenty of things to offer, but they’re not growing the ones I was after: and . Anyway, I got instead purple basil, lemon basil (Kemangi in Indonesian), strawberry mint and parsley. The parsley [...]

Spring is finally here and there has been quite a lot going on the past few weeks. I’ve transplanted the tomato seedlings from the small white plastic cups to transparent bigger plastic cups, and then some of them to the final destination: the plastic brown pots. Actually I wanted to transplant all 9 seedlings today, [...]

Finally got access to my wordpress back. The widely broadcasted attack on wordpress installations caused the admin of my free hosting site to lock out all wordpress admin pages. This means, no updating was possible. Oh well, I hope the attack is over. A snippet into the German culture: during our working group meeting this [...]

Too much light can be bad for plants. That’s what I learned in the past two weeks. Some tomato varieties cannot handle too much light apparently, because some leaves became a bit burned and yellowish. So now I’m reducing the number of hours the fluorescent lamps stay on. Apart from that I’ve transplanted one seedling [...]

Some seeds from deaflora arrived this week: Dragon’s Tongue and Aramis bush beans, Golden Sweet peas, red and . I’ve sowed some perilla and mitsuba seeds (the ones in the black plastic tray covered with a transparent plastic bag), but no germination yet. The thyme and spring onion seeds sowed last week are coming up [...]

The snow outside makes it definitely impossible to get any germination going outdoors. It’ll be still 2 months before the day they say it will be frost free. In any case, the tomato and chili seedlings are going strong indoors under the 2 desk lamps. All varieties I’m growing have representatives, and more actually. So [...]

Yet another year to start gardening. I’ve started sowing some tomato and chili seeds indoors. I should’ve prepared a bit better, buying plastic cups before I started sowing the seeds. They act as more practical containers than small pots because they’re cheap and deep (hmm it rhymes). There are 9 varieties of tomatoes in the [...]

Well, it’s been a rather kind year. Things are progressing on many aspects of life, and I’m really grateful for that. Nevertheless, it’s time to step it up. Next year is the time of achievement. And I’ll begin by moving into a private accomodation; out from the shelter of the totally furnished with single rent [...]

I’ve started cleaning up the balcony. It was hard work transferring the used soil on the pots to a plastic bag to be thrown away in the dump and then cleaning up for the pots themselves to be used for next year (if I get a place with a balcony…). Harvested like 40 chillis before [...]