it’s fucking cold out and has been a lot lately, my tomatoes are not happy and I feel very guilty for not having enough money to give them a space heater. It’s not like we don’t have them, we’ve actually acquired a small army over the years as new models are more energy efficient or old units die. Unfortunately, the cost of running a space heater in the basement is too much considering we have four going upstairs to ease share the workload of our house-heater monster who is running almost nonstop for however long this average-high-of-10 nonsense has been going on.
I have no idea what kind of impact this cold will have on these plants, are they going to die? If there is such a spot, they’re actually in the warmest part of the basement—since it’s partly remodeled, a rather large closet is therefore in the middle of the basement, 3 walls are just the other parts of the basement. Rather than the cement foundation which is backed against some seriously chilly Earth: the floor is all cement, though, which is why no one sits directly on that surface.
I have no idea how well they’d respond to a space heater, the air is very dry and we’d probably need to put in a humidifier. Having a real greenhouse during the growing season will be such a blast, but in the meantime…focus! Why does not having enough money to do this or that for my plants make me feel guilty? For the simple reason that I gave them life and helped them grow this far—though by ‘helped’ I often feel like we gave them some food, water, and light and they busted out of our starter containers. That’s slightly dramatized, truth be told we’re not the most organized of people because of imbalances and ‘we should transplant the tomatoes’ was a thing that came up more than once.
For some reason, we’ve always had a hard time starting things or following through with what we did actually start. I might be able to fill this blog with stories of ‘that one time’ and make them sound like funny learning experiences.
We window shopped through the internets looking at plants and flowering trees, Zeffy has been on this land for decades and he’s really wanted to fluff this place out with fragrance and wildlife food. I set to sprouting several of the Royal Empress tree seeds we’d bought {amazing beings—grow fast, huge leaves, fragrant blossoms, can totally thrive in our zone} and most of them came up! Unless my memory is groggy, which is very possible because I was ‘taking care of them’ {undiagnosed ADHD, totally got this! I really don’t got this…} and Zeffy trusted me, so had his own things he was taking care of like managing our finances. Well I don’t feel the flow of time and periodically I’d remember to water them and they looked healthy enough, but I noticed something about the sides of the fiber pots they were in.
There was black mold growing on the sides of the pots because they were too close together and never rotated, not getting enough air flow and so moisture got trapped. I completely freaked out, my memory of the events following are spotty… we cut away the mold and threw it outside, I think the stress and jostling killed all the plants because there is no evidence to the contrary.
Royal Empress trees are pricey, theoretically, because they are challenging to grow from seed; I might have had a natural green thumb, passed on genetically, but the rest of my body is a complex blur of colours and vibrations. I’ve never gotten another sprout from those seeds and once this frigid weather passes, perhaps I’ll try again so we have a ‘slip’ to plant in the spring.
