Look at my little plant nursery! Isn’t it adorable? In order to make them transportable, I put the pots on a tray before because I keep the seedlings inside overnight and set them outside during the day, a) so they can get some sun, and b) to start hardening them off a bit. I was kind of looking for a more aesthetically pleasing alternative, though, and fell in love with this white miniature green house from IKEA. You can’t use it as a real green house because it doesn’t close off completely, but it protected my seedlings from the harsh March winds. I wrote about sowing basil, dillweed, and chive in a previous post. Since then, I added peppermint, Thai basil, lemongrass, and cilantro, plus some flowers.
While growing plants from seed is definitely the most fun part of gardening, sometimes you need to take care of boring tasks like re-potting as well. This is fine if you’re talking about small plants like my elephant’s foot, which I put in a bonsai pot using cactus soil. (Apparently it’s better to plant them in wide, but shallow containers.) My monstera however was a different animal altogether. She’s my oldest plant – my uncle gave her to me when I was maybe ten or twelve? I’ve dreadfully neglected her during my teenage years, but she persevered. Honestly, I’m not sure if she’s been re-potted in … ever? Her roots had actually grown to the plastic pot so we had to cut her out of it. I gave her a bigger pot and then put her in a large seagrass basket. Her air roots will be able to grow inside the basket as much as she wants, but at the same time they won’t be as readily available for Oscar’s nefarious purposes. 😉
We’d picked up this macrame hanging pot a couple of months back at Aldi, then realized we couldn’t find a plastic pot high and small enough to fit into it. In the end I bought drainage pellets to put below the soil layer in the hopes it would help avoid the waterlogging that inevitably happens when you put plants straight into a pot without drainage holes. We’ll see how it goes. My new favourite is this little cactus! I’ve grown it from seed – honestly to see if I could do it, because it’s a lot more practical to just buy a plant at a nursery! They grow very, very slowly. I sowed them last year. This little guy is the biggest of four cacti that germinated, and he’s maybe two centimetres high!
Outside, I repotted most of my perennial herbs into larger pots. They’re all really busy foliating. I guess they like their new homes!
We bought spring flowers for our balcony flower boxes. It’s been so nice to see some colour outside! The croci bloomed first, then the daffodils, and since last weeks the tulip joined them!