the weather was nice, with temperature at 75 degrees. it was warm enough that i just wore a t-shirt, and probably could've busted out the shorts too, as weird as they may be for early april, when the daytime average should be around the 50's.
i started with something easy: planting some baby bokchoi and chinese celery seeds into 4 seed starter trays. yes, i did start some in outdoor window box planters, but i want to grow a few indoors just in case those don't germinate. for the bokchoi i planted a seed per cell, but for the chinese celery i planted at least 2 seeds per cell because the seeds were so tiny.
next i went to water the plants in the grow room. for some reason the soil in many of the potted plants were still wet, so my father could've already watered them last night or this morning. i was going to leave them as-is, but i noticed some mealybugs on some of the jasmines, so decided - because the weather was so nice today - to move them outside so i could spray them with pesticide. it gave me a chance to use the manual sprayer pump that i got from temu. it screws onto a 2L soda bottle. i mixed a solution of pyrethrin, after checking online that it would indeed kill mealybugs (there's no mention of them on the instruction label). the recommended amount is 5 tbsp of concentrated pyrethrin to 1 gallon of water. since there's about 4L in a gallon, i used 1-1/4 tsbp of concentrated pyrethrin. that math is actually wrong, because for some reason i thought i was using 1L when in fact it was 2L, so i really should've used 2-1/2 tbsp of pyrethrin. disregarding my calculation error, the pyrethrin was actually pretty strong, smelled like gasoline. and when i dripped some into the laundry sink, i could see the oily residue going down the drain.
the manual sprayer worked pretty well at first and i was pretty happy with it. then i started to notice it was leaking pressurized air from the opening. the rubber gasket didn't seem to be sealing correctly, and after that no amount of adjusting would fix the problem. luckily i had my 2 gallon garden sprayer, so i dumped the pyrethrin solution into that and used it to spray the jasmines and gardenia. today was so warm, i was tempted to just leave the jasmines outside. the only reason why i wouldn't is because they have so much insecticide, i'm afraid pollinating insects (like early season bees) might unwittingly be poisoned. however, the last time i applied systemic insecticide was back in mid-february, and it's only effective for 2 months, so the plants are almost safe enough to be outside.
how well did the deadlier pyrethrin work? i won't know until next weekend, when i inspect the jasmines and gardenia once again. if nothing else, pyrethrin is much oilier, so it could just suffocate the mealybugs from that alone.
afterwards i took the 2 gallon sprayer into the bathroom and rinsed it out with some soapy water to get rid of the smelly oily pyrethrin residue inside the tank. i think the manual sprayer that screws onto a plastic soda bottle doesn't work so well because the seal can easily be broken when the bottle is under pressure. better to buy a dedicated manual pressure sprayer, with better sealing.
i went back to the basement grow room to water the rest of the plants. the badly damaged orchid from my godmother, with the purple leaves, i noticed it's starting to form a flower stalk. the large green upright orchid is also forming one as well. this means of the 4 orchids still in the basement, 3 of them have flower stalks. that reminded me to feed them with some acid loving fertilizer.
next i potted the spiderworts, which have been rooting in water during the winter. they should've been potted a long time ago, i just got lazy. originally i was going to use terracotta pots, but those absorb too much water, leaving the plants dry and requiring more frequent watering. in the end i decided on some small square plastic pots. once these spiderworts have properly rooted, i can think about upgrading them to better pots. there was some leftover miracle-gro potting soil in the backyard that i used.
i planted a bunch of pea seeds. in RB0 and RB1, i planted flowering peas that don't produce edible pods. in RB2 and RB4, i planted sugar snap peas. i've had terrible luck with peas, mainly because rabbits eat the tender seedlings before they ever get a chance to grow. hopefully we can erect some rabbit fencing before the peas germinate.
by now it was close to 1pm. i decided to take a break by flying my drone. what i really wanted to check out was the solar house next to the reservoir. when my mother and i went walking over the weekend, i noticed they had even more rain barrels than i previously though. like us, they have barrels around the entire perimeter of the house to catch the rain coming from the roof. i wanted to get a count of just how many interconnected barrels they had. even though today was a sunny day, i wasn't expecting it to be so windy, so i kept on getting high wind warnings. it also made flying a little difficult, sometimes a strong wind gust would blow the drone off course. i flew for about 15 minutes before calling the drone back.
i attached the new manifold to one of the rain barrels next to the sunroom. they still need to be adjusted, we noticed last season that the red "catch" barrel was inefficiently feeding the remaining barrels in sequence, which made the catch barrel liable to overflow during strong rainstorms. this year we'd like to try a parallel feeding connection,
i moved all the jasmines and gardenia back into the basement before watering them with fertilized water.
i dragged the last bag of chicken manure and sprinkled some into the western bed. i used the garden rake to work the fertilizer into the soil, and to keep it from smelling too much. the remaining bag of chicken manure i left on top of the compost bin. any seepage would only any more nutrients to the compost.
the last gardening thing i did was to water the beds. i also wanted to dethatch the lawn before applying crabgrass preventer and fertilizer, but i think i'll wait until this weekend, when we're expected to get some showers sunday then more steady rain monday. i finally left belmont by 2:30pm.
i got back home around 2:45pm. i didn't stay long, before i went back out to get some groceries at market basket. i decided to make some greek salad for dinner. retrieving my bike, i ran into paul, who was planting flowers in the front yard planter. he asked how i liked the new plant. "what new plant?" i said. "oh, you might not have even noticed," he replied. "no, i noticed," i told. he told me the previous bush was already dead, but i told him it still flowers every june. i avoided making it even more awkward, by not asking him why i wasn't consulted before they decided to remove the laurel. i learned from him that they're actually leaving in 2 weeks, hence all this spruce work. jeff and melissa are returning (may 1st), the couple that was here last year. "steve told you, right?" i said this was my first time hearing of it.
3:30pm wasn't a busy time at market basket, and they only had half the registers opened. i got a few things before returning. paul was still outside, putting the finishing touches on some yard work. he asked if i knew anything about the ivy growing on the front facade of the house. the leaves looked withered, and he'd trimmed them all off. i told him it was natural, and that i saw the same thing happening at my parents' place. i don't think it was so much the winter, which was very mild, and rather the summer before, where we hardly ever got any rain. that made it so many plants weren't able to survive through the winter.
4pm back at the house, i finally had a chance to have some lunch. i warmed up an old baguette in the oven (wetted and then wrapped in tin foil), ate it with some brie and some norwegian mackerel in tomato sauce, courtesy of frances. i thought it'd be strips of fish, but it was actually just a processed nugget of fish, kind of like a fish meatloaf. it was pretty good, even though the fish did have a slight metallic taste from the can.
grow closet update: one of the long beans has sprouted! that's basically the only thing that's germinated. it wasn't even one of the plants on the heating pad, which you'd think would be first to sprout.
i didn't start dinner until well after 8pm, waiting for my leftover frozen chicken breasts to defrost. i made a greek-inspired marinade of olive oil, greek yogurt, lemon juice, minced garlic, dried oregano, and salt/pepper. the instructions said to marinate them for at least 30 minutes, so i wouldn't be able to grill them until after 9pm.
i was watching the hawks-heat play-in game. i still think this new NBA playoff system is really weird, i wish they'd go back to the old way, instead of stringing 4 teams per conference to fight for the 7th and 8th seed. none of these teams have a realistic chance of beating the more elite teams that are in the higher seeds, and because these lower teams have to play more games, they're even more disadvantaged from being worn out. anyway, by the time i tuned into the game, the hawks were leading the heat by nearly 20 points. i ended up watching the whole game, forgetting about dinner until the game finally ended around 10pm. atlanta ended up beating miami, who a lot of people were expecting to win easily and face off against the celtics on saturday. as a celtics fan, the heat was the one opponent i didn't want to see in the first round, given how they narrowly won game 7 last year. celtics have a better record against the hawks - sweeping them (3-0) this year. however i don't expect the hawks to be pushovers. beating miami, they've shown a lot of heart, and will face off against boston with nothing to lose, which makes them a dangerous opponent. i still expect the celtics to prevail, but i think the hawks will win at least one game.
i started making dinner around 10:30pm, grilled the marinated chicken in the smokeless foreman grill (SFG). i'm starting to think that the SFG wasn't such a good buy. first of all, it takes up a lot of space, when i really only wanted a small foreman grill to replace my old one of nearly 2 decades. the digital touchscreen is just a gimmick and not worth it since all meats will grill at 425°. the george foreman website doesn't even sell this model anymore, the closest one just has a simple interface with no temperature or time controls. the one thing i like about the SFG is that the non-stick cooking surfaces are removable, which makes them easier to clean (when they're not so hot to touch). and the SFG is the only thing i use to cook bacon, because i can do it outside so it doesn't stink up the house.
while the chicken was grilling, i made the dressing, which was just equal parts olive oil and red wine vinegar, with some dried oregano, minced garlic, salt, and sugar. i added the ingredients in a jar and manually mixed everything together by shaking with the lid on. as for the salad, iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, banana peppers, feta cheese, cilantro, black olives. i ended up eating well after 11pm.
around midnight i took out the trash. after weeks of me not doing it, my upstairs neighbors finally pulled out the bins tonight. of course since they almost never take out the trash, they put the bins in the wrong direction, even though if they just looked at the other neighbors, they'd realize their mistake. like back when we had regular trash cans, they always took the lid off for some reason. said it was easier for the trash guys, but made the open trash an easy target for critters like rats and raccoons.
at 1:30am i had an explosive case of diarrhea. could've been many things: not washing the lettuce, eating brie for lunch, drinking 4 glasses of chai milk, adding low-fat feta cheese to the salad. as far as runs go, it was pretty mild.