weird and wonderful colors and shapes

The Natural History Museum in Paris is a collection of associated museums (they're not apparently actually one entity; you have to pay separate to get into each section, though there is a discount for having been to another). They consist of a large garden with buildings around the perimeter, plus a zoo. Of course, in February, the gardens are perhaps not at their best.

the indomitable tomato plant

The indomitable tomato

So you remember how I said a few weeks ago that we had a week of wind and one of the big tomato plants fell over and squished my tomato seedlings?

Or maybe I didn't and just posted on Facebook. Well, we had a week of hard wind, followed by a few days of reasonable weather, followed by almost a week of not quite as much wind... and one of my bigger tomato plants fell over and squished the seedlings I'd planted out just before the wind because the weather looked like it was going to hold.

there are peas!

I noticed the first tomatoes yesterday,

sad sage is sad

A few days ago, I noticed that my sage looked like it had some whitish spots on it, but didn't think much of it.

Today, it looked a lot worse, so I asked the internet. It looks like I've got a case of powdery mildew.  Apparently, I have inadvertently provided it good conditions: warmish days with cool nights, most watering done from overhead, allowing humidity within the plant, and not a ton of air circulation (it's gotten quite bushy and thick).

planting

A couple of years ago, I semi-successfully managed to have beans and tomatoes on the balcony. I intended to try again last year, but the weather was so weird for so long that it was May before I knew it, and too late to really try.

green things

1.  It takes a remarkable amount of dirt to fill a pot.

seeds

I'm not particularly good at keeping plants alive.  Or at least, I'm not particularly good at getting them to thrive. I have had several plants over the years that survived (an African violet that never flowered after the ones it had when I got it died, though it stayed green for a few years... a handful of orchids that were similar... a couple kitchen herbs that made it a few months...).  Most of the time, I get a young plant, and forget to water it.  Or get some seeds or bulbs, and they sprout, and turn into seedlings... and then die from over or under watering.  I did have a number of plants in my aquariums that did pretty well, but mostly as long as I had the appropriate amount of lighting for them, they were fine - because if I didn't have enough water to keep them alive, there wouldn't've been enough water to keep the fish alive either. Plants are simply not as good at reminding you to feed them as cats are.