My vitex trifolia’s flowers have finally bloomed. For a plant which is reputed to be a superb mozzie repellent, its flowers are delicately-plumed and a graceful purple. And they’re pretty tiny!
I pruned the plant the other day and gave three cuttings to a fellow GCSer. Methinks they’d root pretty well.
Articles to a village in Samoa using the plant to combat dengue:
Making mosquitoes buzz off, the natural, traditional way
I’ve cleared A LOT of plants which were either dying, dead, or too sickly from the RSM attacks to be of use. So far, I have cleared:
1. Totem cherry tomato – I suspect it’s my small planter box, with a lack of certain fertilizers, and then an overdose of fertilizers that killed it;
2. Old pots of chocolate mints – too scarred by RSMs; still have some rebel forces of RSMs hiding beneath some leaves;
3. Two pak choy plants – the ones in the water reservoir started lagging and not doing well, even after so long. So off they went;
4. Suspected black peppermint – took cuttings to root; threw away mother pot;
5. Original pot of lemon balm – this was from ONE single stem cutting I took from my first pot of lemon balm, which my dad killed. Got too attacked by RSMs;
6. Lemon basil | Sweet basil | Italian Genovese basil – I’ve let all of them bolt. Since I don’t use basil at all, might as well collect the seeds for future planting, and clear out the parent plants;
7. Piper sarmentosum – so battered by the rain.
I think that’s about all for the moment. I’m currently doing a lot of stem cuttings to root new plants, so that I can throw away the parent plants which are/have been attacked and scarred badly by red spider mites.
Lemon myrtle is growing like…I dunno. O_o It’s huge, and definitely top-heavy.
Posted by blur ting on May 27, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Sad to hear that your tomato plant is gone. After I tossed away the first bath, I’m now growing a new lot of cherry tomatoes from seeds I salvaged from the kitchen. Hope they’re more resilient. My parents have great success growing cherry tomatoes in the ground and they don’t even lavish any attention yet they grow so well!
Recently I cleared up my garden too. Mine is more of a water-logging problem than anything else. So I improved draining of the soil and kind of elevated the pots by placing small pebbles underneath.
Posted by blur ting on May 28, 2009 at 1:37 am
I have one question about shooting small flowers. When I use my normal digicam, I use macro or super macro function to shoot closeups of flower buds and seedlings. But often, if the object is too small, I find it impossible to focus, (end up the background gets shap while the object is blurred) how do I overcome this problem?
Posted by skyfiery on May 28, 2009 at 4:19 am
Hey, Ting:
Regarding photography, sometimes it’s better to use the manual focus function (I’m not sure if the camera you have has it) because even with the super macro function, the subject may sometimes be way too small for the auto-focus to be able to pick it up. In that case, either compensate with manual focus, or one has to accept that the camera can’t support subjects that small. Even my S3IS with the 0cm macro function sometimes don’t deal well. That’s the limitations of a consumer camera, I’m afraid. >.<
And I think I'll grow tomatoes only when I get my own house. It's a bit too troublesome otherwise.
Posted by blur ting on May 28, 2009 at 11:35 am
I am using the compact Olympus with many many limitations. I’m eyeing on the new Lumix T27. The review was very good!
Posted by skyfiery on May 28, 2009 at 1:47 pm
You might want to check out the Canon G9 or G10 as well.