The PET Water tower

Well, it’s been a while. But after all, there didn’t happen anything interesting to write about since my last post, until now.

I’ve spent a week at my parents home during the easter days, so I had to find a way to water my plants without being here. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts one of my flower boxes came with an integrated water tank. So these plants won’t make any problem. For the other flower box, I took an empty PET bottle, filled it with water and put it bottom down into the earth.

That way the plants got as much water as they needed, while the soil didn’t get too soggy. One (very hot and sunny) week later, the tower looked  still has reserves for some days

Seems to be quite a good system, so I think I’ll stick to it even though I’m back here again.

The warm weather and the extra dose of sun did quite good to my chilis, the largest Numex Twilight is now measuring about 17cm

Sadly, my Dorsets only reach a height of 4cm

Besides, I had both flowerboxes coverd with thick, quite disgusting coat of mold again (unfortunately I forgot to make a foto before I treated it). So the liverwort extract mixture seems to work only temporary. Nevertheless I sprayed a lot of the mixture on the ground to get rid of the mold.

Fighting Mold, Part 2

Ok, it’s been a while, even since the liverwort extract arrived. I bought a 1 liter spraying bottle and mixed about 5 milliliter (however you may measure this) with 1 liter of water. Thereafter I sprayed the mixture onto the soil until everything got wet a little.  So, to get started, some images of the mold before I treated it with the extract

Quite disgusting, eh? Now it’s a week since I first used the liverwort extract, and it worked quite well. There are still some white spots, but nothing like the fur visible on the images above. If you’re courious about the patch of moss I planted, it’s slowly dying. I think it’s to dry inside here for it to grow. And if you’re curious abouth the progress of my plants: The NuMex Twilight have grown quite well within the last weeks, and even the Dorset Naga show some progress. So here are some new close-ups, as well as some fotos of the nearly mold free earth:

Moldfree soil

A Dorset Naga Seedling

A Numex Twilight Seedling

Fighting mold, part 1

Within the last few days, I’ve recognized there’s growing some mold in my flower boxes. Abusing google a little I found out that this might be a result of to much watering, but found nothing about the mold being a thread to my seedlings. So since I’m no asthmetic, I might ignore it.

But afterall, I don’t like to. So I googled a little further and found out that moss, especially liverwort should help against mold. So I decided to give it a try and ordered some liverwort extract from nature.de. So as soon as it arrives I’ll tell you about the effect in “Fighting mold, part 2”

For today, I just tried to plant a patch of moss from my garden into the NuMex Twilight box, just out of curiosity if it has some effect. Below are some fotos of the patch, the mold and the promised closeup of one of my NuMex Twilight seedling, wich contrary to my Dorset Naga seedling seem to develop really good. To boost the Dorset Naga growing a little, I’ve added some tomato fertilizer (this stuff really smells, but since I dug it that ain’t no problem 🙂 ), following the advice of some guy from the local garden center.