Mould on soil around tomatoes

Since I potted on the tomatoes there hasn't really been any growth (8 days ago) but I assumed they would just be recovering from the transplant shock and that roots would be growing. I used a mixture of a tomato compost and soil. Today I came home to find a large amount of mould growing on the soil of two of the plants. Any ideas?



Not great pictures but I don't seem to be able to get any decent ones any more.



I didn't have anything to use as proper drainage so I scrunched up some newspaper and put it in the bottom of each pot. If anything I was worried this would mean I'd need to be extra careful to water enough as the paper would draw water out of the soil (which is what drainage is supposed to help with I suppose). Am hoping it might just be these two but if it's some horrible disease then presumably everything else will probably have or get it.

Ta-da!

There's definitely going to be a learning curve with this whole drying malarkey. Need to cut smaller bits next time (was trying not to cut too small in case the bits shrivelled up to nothing). And should just switch it on a bit later and leave it running overnight rather than getting up in the middle of the night to check it a couple of times. Switched it off around half-five because I really needed a full two hours sleep before getting up for work and didn't thnk it needed that much more time. But it did need a bit more. So, although some bits are a bit squishy rather than dried I'm happy with the results. I didn't actually try any until I got home from work this evening but the strawberry bits taste just like jam. Fabulous.


I just popped the finished product into a couple of glass jars and have them in the fridge. Will need to use them fairly quickly I think as they aren't all fully dried. Mind you, I don't think the strawberries would last long anyway.

650g of strawberries gave me 100g dried
425g onions gave me 50g dried

New adventure

About an hour ago I switched on the dehydrator in my first attempt at drying food. Got a kilo of strawberries at the weekend but somehow only 650g have made it into the dehydrator. That's two trays full.



Since I had another three trays I thought I'd throw in a few onions as well. Not sure if the flavours will mix during the process or not but have put the strawberries on top in case of any dripping (thought strawberry flavoured onions sounded better than onion flavoured strawberries) and as the motor of the dehydrator is also on the top. Then again, heat rises of maybe if heat builds up the flavour from the onions will be wafting upwards. Time will tell. Googling it would probably also tell but where's the fun in that.

Yesterday I finally potted on some tomato seedlings which I really probably should have done about two weeks ago. Still have some left to do but will get to them tomorrow hopefully. The ones I did weren't root bound so I'm hoping my neglect has just slowed growth rather than complete buggering them up. I'm so late with them I even bought one already well progressed tomato plant a couple of weeks ago but then I also left that one sitting in its much too small pot. It was very root bound so we'll see if it recovers. I bought a sage plant at the same time which I also moved into a bigger pot yesterday, discovering along the way that it was actually two plants in one pot. I hate it when supermarkets to that but there's really no reason for a garden centre type place to do so.

Following a tip from Potio Appotment I have planted the seedlings nearly up to the first leaves. It should encourage more lateral root growth contributing to a more sturdy plant.

I have three bay plants growing in one big pot that also need to be potted on. They were from a supermarket plant which I got about four years ago. I painstakingly separated out each of the seven plants which were squished into the teeny tiny pot and planted them out into bigger pots. Then nothing happened. The a whole lot more nothing but they also didn't seem to be dead. Finally, two summers later, just as I was about to dump them onto the compost, one or two of them got a couple of new leaves. So I left them be and last year there were another few new leaves. They survived the move to Germany (well, I brought one pot that had three of them in it) and this year seem to be really loving the sunny windowsill in my kitchen - the biggest one has grown at least three new sets of huge leaves. My brother reports that the others which I left with him are also doing well.

And I've learned that contrary to some people's experiences, it is really, really easy to kile aloe vera plants. The plant I bought last summer seemed to be thriving and was overflowing from the pot it was in so I bought some soil that was supposed to be suitable for cactii and aloe vera and put each part into a different pot (as I had been advised to). Almost all of them are dead or dying less than four weeks later. Will have to learn a bit more about aloe vera before replacing with a new plant I think.

And here's what was for dinner this evening - summer is definitely here foodwise although the organic farmers at the market have yet to show up with any tomatoes.



Salad leaves with some turkey salami, a few bits of bauerkaese (farmers' cheese) and a simple vinaigrette dressing. It looked like so much on the plate but it didn't last long. Who knew when I was growing up that it wasn't actually salad that I hated, just iceberg and butterhead lettuce!

Friendship

From the wonderful Hedgewizard's Diary (don"t know where he got it but it did make me laugh out loud so I thought I'd share)

Leftovers and filing

I spent almost all day yesterday (eight hours on a beautifully sunny day!) sorting out papers and all the filing I hadn't finished doing. I now have everything sorted by year and ready for proper filing in actual folders. Actually I had pretty much everything done up to around the end of 2006, the last time I tackled it all properly and from 2007 plenty of things are processed so to speak (i.e. receipts attached to bank statements and that kind of thing) and just need putting away properly. And the piles for the other years are fairly small. But such a relief to finally, once and for all, have it done. I would often think I had it done at least up to a certain point in time and then another box or bag would turn up that I had shoved stuff into. Now that I have the space to not just shove things wherever they fit I am finally doing it properly. And I have my medical expenses tax claims ready and waiting to be processed, just need an answer from Revenue on one question and I go enter them onto the website. My couch is covered in paper: but what the hell. Definitely worth it to get this done. Then I can start thinking about doing my German tax return.

Having had to pay for the car repair I've definitely been having a storecupboard diet week or two till the end of the month. Brought all my empty bottles back to the supermarket on Saturday so that I could buy some veg at the market. Got seven onions, two big carrots and a kilo of potatoes for 4 euro and then a few slices of turkey salami and, to be adventurous, two rabbit legs. They'd been marinated in a spicy oil (mostly rosemary and chili I think) so I fried them yesterday for lunch and at them with some wheat which I had flavoured by adding a bit of lemon juice to the cooking water and then thrown some peas and corn into. Delicious although rabbits legs really don't have a lot of meat on them. I knew this. But now I really know it.

So tonight I'm having the best kind of leftovers. At least I have high hopes for it. Leftover wheat/peas/corn is being heated up, I threw in a tin of tomatoes so it didn't dry out and I had a mettwurst in the fridge which I'm also going to add. Then I had the great idea to try some chutney and have added a couple of spoons of pumpkin chutney to it as well. It smells fabulous so I don't care that the wheat will be hopelessly overcooked by the time it's heated through again.

Did some reading this weekend about vertical gardening and now have a brain brimming with ideas and wanting to completely rearrange my living room so that I actually will be able to grow some of my own food this year.

And found out today that the cost to me of repairing the rental car is 465, so will get 335 refunded to me, which will make a HUGE difference to my budget for the next couple of months (i.e. will allow me to actually have a budget instead of trying to make my storecupboard stretch that far. Which it couldn't.)

Crappy weather today, horrible black clouds but I feel good.

The Age of Stupid

Just in case anyone hasn't heard about it yet, this sounds like a really interesting film. The Age of Stupid had it's premiere last week and went on general release from yesterday, 20 March. I watched the documentary of the making of the film online and thought it was very interesting. Here's the blurb about it:

The Age of Stupid is the new movie from Director Franny Armstrong (McLibel) and producer John Battsek (One Day In September). Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance? It will be released in UK cinemas on 20 March 2009, followed by other countries.

The website is here

Water bath preserving

Just back from a week in Ireland where I lurched from one disaster to the next. Hired a car and it turned out my super duper rate really was too good to be true as it didn't include insurance (I had booked on the international rather than the Irish website and it isn't automatically included then) so I ended up having to pay for that as well. Then I bashed the car off a wall in the underground car park (honestly didn't see the corner of wall which extended about two inches into the space I was reversing into but my goodness what a horrible sound it makes in the car when you do that - I had no idea). So had to pay the 800 euro excess as the scratch went through the paintwork - should find out tomorrow if I'll get any refunded of that. If they just fix it I should, if they decide they want to go ahead and replace the entire bumper I won't see much of a refund. C'est la vie but of all the ways I might have found to focus my mind back onto budgeting this wasn't really near the top of my list!

However, I did get to spend time with lots of people. Was on the go or staying with someone the whole time and generally had a lovely time despite the worrying about paying for the car, fighting off a cold and the fact that many of the people I was catching up with are going to be made redundant in a week or two (and a friend of mine whose husband works in a recruitment agency told me that he is getting at least 400 CVs for every position they have so the chances of most of those people getting new jobs quickly don't seem too high). I'm not sure what I was expecting but I think I thought I'd have very strong feelings going back and wasn't sure if they'd be positive or negative. But really I was kind of indifferent to it all and the feeling remains that I was right to leave Ireland but wish that I was still working there instead of here. Still, I am seven months into things here and can hold out for another four and then it's nearly a year and once the year is up maybe I'll start looking for something else and to hell with thinking it's a bad idea to do that when the economy is the way it is.

It was exciting to come home to some parcels though and I picked a few more up from the post office this evening. Cue photos of my new water bath canners:

Only the shorter one has the inset part i.e. the bit you put the jars on to make sure they're not touching the direct heat source like so:

But I know a folded up teatowel can also be used and I'm sure you can buy replacements if you really want to. I am surprised at how huge these things are though. I put a corkscrew into the photo for comparison - I thought they wouldn't be that much bigger than my stockpot but they really are. So I think two is definitely more than enough. Not bad going for 5.30 plus shipping really. Roll on the summer!