Like @finley said, you probably need to keep a closer eye on the water levels, especially if you’re using small containers as suggested above.
It’s pretty hot at the moment. I’m needing to water my basil at least every other day or it starts wilting, and that’s inside in fairly large containers. (Fortunately it’s basil, so quite tolerant of underwatering, unlike some other plants where all the leaves fall off.)
Thank you Sir. Noted… My Filipina cleaner/assistant whatever, said similar, but you explained the theory behind it.
I asked the lady in the garden shop for the darkest, heaviest soil. She brought me a bag of really dark, damp, lush feeling soil. She said “Zhege hen Yin”… which I guess comes from Yin/Yang.
I might also go plant them in shady places by the Danshui MRT.
Chinese is incredibly frustrating. You go home and look up ‘yin’, taking a guess at the tone that was used, and 68 possible characters pop up, all with completely implausible meanings.
If you can get a large planting box, I recommend just chucking a big ol’ piece of rotten wood from the forest in there at the bottom. It will slowly decompose and feed all the useful bacteria and fungi that you need.
Good advice. I actually bought them right on the day the marathon rain season ended. I think we had a month of solid rain in May/Early June. I figured the sky would take care of them. Then it quickly flipped to Mexico conditions, and I didn’ t get my head round it. The forecast said rain, but there wasn’t enough in Danshui.
I set myself a bottle out just outside my patio door, tied a coloured shoelace round it, and put it on a raised box. I can’t miss it now.
In general, do ppl think it’s best to slightly over-water than under water?
I think I’ll add Iodine to the water…
I might start a thread called ‘Walking In Taipei After Midnight’ when I get a minute. Maybe you’ll have some ideas…
Peace
It can be frustrating sometimes, but I actually find single syllable entries on Yabla mysterious and evocative.
I was looking up ‘Kang’ to transliterate my name a few years ago. There were 5-10 choices. I also liked the way ‘Jie’ could invoke a street, an older sister, or the maddest Emperor who ever lived.
I will try and remember to clarify by saying Yin/Yang de Yin?
Actually been using that soil for DIY mudbaths, to good effect. One of the oldest therapies in existence. Just got be be really careful of drains.
Oh yeah, I have one “Chinese is incredibly frustrating #andalsoembarrasing” story. I kind of blotted it from my memory… I’ll type it up when I get time. It’ll be called:
“The Spinning Sword Dancer”
Suffice it to say, one of the best qualities of a linguist is being able to take looking like an idiot 4 or 5 times a day. When I taught in Wimbledon, Arab students had this quality. They would just laugh off mistakes. Japanese female students didn’t so much, and it inhibited their progress. Im about halfway between the two polarities.
I just tell myself this is “Forest Gump Learns Mandarin” and take it from there…
Probably the yin in yin’an (陰暗), meaning dark?
I strongly feel this is right. It was dark, wet, cool, nutritious… all yin qualities.
~O~
Flowers are doing alright since I moved them inside. Should move them to my window sill.
Slightly under.
Yeah, I agree. Not many plants like to grow in perpetually soggy soil.
Don’t be afraid of letting the soil surface dry out. It’s normal. Either get a soil moisture meter, or stick a finger an inch below the surface and see if it’s a bit damp.
I really wouldn’t add chemicals of any sort to the water, except possibly a very small amount of NPK + micronutrients. There are two basic ways of growing plants: you can either meter out the plant’s exact requirements into an inert (more-or-less sterile) medium, or you can simply build a normal, functioning ecosystem and allow the plant and its symbionts to figure stuff out for itself. The second method is invariably easier and less prone to failure.
I’m not an expert on soil chemistry, and I don’t think anybody is (it’s all a bit mysterious, and holy wars are fought over, say, the role of calcium and magnesium in soil structure). But the bottom line is that plants get their nutrients not just by sucking stuff up through a biological straw, but by interacting with other organisms that perform various biochemical services. All of the macro- and micronutrients that plants need are there in the soil, but not usually in a form they can use directly: without microbial or fungal action, they’re inaccessible. Industrial farmers (and hydroponics operators) work around this by adding them in soluble form. Before that, they achieved a similar effect by ploughing, but this literally ‘burns up’ the soil fertility by presenting a large reactant surface area to atmospheric oxygen. The soil you bought is good not because it’s loaded with nutrients (the nutrient analysis for compost is usually uninteresting) but because it’s loaded with organic matter, bacteria, and fungal spores.
If you add disinfectants like iodine and H2O2, you’re going to kill anything that might conceivably help your plants in their quest to find nutrients. Pine oil is most likely going to be detrimental - conifers are allelopathic (few things can grow underneath them) and the chemicals that produce that effect are most likely in the oil extract. You can raise plants the ‘industrial’ way - by just providing the right chemicals - and indeed you have to do that to a certain extent because your soil volume is limited. But you really don’t need anything other than what’s provided in a packet of houseplant fertilizer.
With some curious exceptions, most plants like company - mint and chili should be just fine in the same pot. Google “companion planting”, but 80% of what you’ll read there is old wives’ tales rather than empirically-sound science.
Yeah, I didn’t get why they’re so insistent on adding something to the water either, but they seem determined to do so, so I couldn’t be bothered bringing it up again. 
As per various other threads, I think there’s a cultural meme in the West that nature is broken and only humans can fix it. Modern farming is based mostly on adding this or fiddling about with that, and completely ignores the fact that plants did just fine without human intervention for millions of years. Gardening books tend to pick this up and amplify it. So people do generally get the idea that if they don’t treat their houseplants like a patient in the ICU, they won’t grow.
No one wants to “fix” nature. It’s about exploiting and manipulating nature for the perceived benefits to humans. Basically, higher yields of the wanted plants, keeping the unwanted ones down.
As often it’s the big corporations, detached from nature, trying to maximize short-term profits, and only caring about long-term damage if they are forced to by regulations and public demand.
Regulations can be avoided by bribes/donations, public demand can be silenced by advertising and fake bio labels.
It’s all quite obvious and logical.
But that’s off topic.
If that were actually the goal, then industrial agriculture would have been stillborn, because it simply doesn’t achieve that (you believe that it does, I suggest, because that’s the way it’s relentlessly presented in the media). The main reason it persists is that governments subsidize it (it is inherently incapable of profit), and various lobbyists are heavily invested in a philosophical position. Industrial agriculture does not “exploit nature” (in the sense of making nature do what we want). It attempts to override nature, replacing natural processes with simpler and more understandable ones. Exploiting nature - in a benign manner - is what happens in non-industrial farming: the farmer’s skill is in understanding how nature works and turning those processes to human advantage.
The yields from a properly-managed ‘natural’ operation can be considerably higher than (say) a corn monocrop, with fewer inputs and fewer externalities. The key, of course, is ‘properly managed’.
Yes, there is a lot of money/bribery involved, but at some point along the line people buy into the belief system. Farmers don’t get bribed: they are (mostly) true believers in the value of chemicals, and that There Is No Alternative. Gardeners aren’t even trying to make profits - they just want their garden to grow. But, again, they manage their garden according to a certain belief system, sometimes because they’re not aware of any other.
The war against nature is broader than that: you can see it manifest in other aspects of Western culture, including civil engineering and medicine. It’s not just a quirk that appears only in farming/gardening.
We are not in disagreement there whatsoever, just different wording.
Thanks for the contributions, everyone.
The flowers I moved into the living room are doing alright. I didn’t think flowers could do alright with no sun.
I think I’ll go from Mint to Rosemary. It’s a lush herb, tastes delicious, and seems to grow well in the hot sun.
Does anyone know what the herb “HuLong” is? It looks slightly like rosemary, except with flatter, more silvery leaves. When the shopkeeper said it, it sounded like Hu2Long2. I asked her “Di Ji Shen” “what tone?” And moved my hands in an upward slant twice as I said Hu Long, to indicate second tone twice. 80% of Taiwanese seem to understand these hand signals as a question about tones.
This poor sweet lady, however, just looked at me blankly, like I was a gesticulating buffoon.
Anyway, nvm…
Will be simplifying even more. Rosemary and Duckweed from now on…
Went with a friend to the hills above Hongshulin. Found a duckweed pond. Took some home and put it in a large clear container. Hopefully it’ll start growing.
Would be really happy if the only farming skill I learned this summer was growing and preparing duckweed.
Many interesting vids on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=duckweed+farm+nutritious
It actually tastes delicious. A really clear taste, not cabbagey or oniony in the slightest. Some say it’s the perfect food.
Is duckweed the same as azolla? I tried growing that a while back and it died. I didn’t think that was possible, but somehow I managed it.
Youtube says they’re both ‘aquatic ferns’.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=azolla+duckweed
Many foods named weeds are highly nutritious. Kudzu comes to mind. A “weed” is immune to pesticides, hard to kill, and grows all over the place, much like Nettles and Australians. It’d make sense that they’d also be nutritious for us. My Mum used to drink nettle tea. When I lived in Prague, I ate fresh dandelions straight from the garden.
Weed is just a subjective word.
I reckon a lot of weeds could partially solve hunger problems.
Duckweed has insane amounts of protein in it. I have a feeling that a vanilla-duckweed smoothie might work.
Im going to try and keep the water clean with Iodine and H202. I might try and dig out my Ozone generator too.
Any other ideas? I guess i’ll just change the water alot.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+grow+duckweed
Some days I spent 3 to 400TWD on cashews and nuts.Gonna start deadlifting again. Need protein.
This is about getting partially off grid. If I could make a dent in my protein bills, that’d be a lot of fun.
Good work team. We’re bringing Hope And Joy to millions here.
The Duckweed is growing, but more like 20% a day.
They recommended potassium permanganate to clean the water. Any substitutes? Iodine?
My patio is too sunny for many plants, but it’s the perfect set up for aquaponics. I think I’ll go in this direction. Life seems to be pushing me that way.
I realized I’d need some pretty big tubs to grow enough duckweed to get me 100g of protein per day.
But that’s cool, the scent is lush. Hard to describe. So fresh. Like, the freshest vegetable ever.