After soaking the seeds for two days, I transferred them to two tiny green houses. As soil I used compressed peat pellets which expand after watering them.
The oregano and basil are already showing leaves!
Time to plant herbs and spices
After a relaxing Spain holiday over Easter, I now found the time to start planting herbs and spices for this year: Rosemary, basil, sage, oregano, lovage, and also Jalapeño chilli peppers.
To start the germination, I put the seeds on multiple layers of kitchen paper soaked with a chamomile infusion. I covered the whole plate with cling film to avoid too much evaporation.
The Tiny Biosphere
As a little biology experiment, I picked random things from the forest behind the house and put them into two small plastic aquariums and sealed everything airtight with silicone. I paced this biosphere on the window and installed a RaspberryPi with PiCam NoIR above it. This was in late March and ever since (with a few brief pauses doe to lack of space on the sd card) the Raspberry took a photo from above every 15 minutes.
Using mencoder and handbrake I compiled a time-lapse video of the past months. It is amazing how alive these plants are and how long the balance in this isolated environment remains stable. (Don’t be fooled by the brownish appearance, this is just due to the colour shift of the infra red camera. The plants are still nearly as green as in the picture above.)
Ready for Spring
In the recent days, I prepared the big flower pot on my balcony for the new plants. This year, I’ll grow tomatoes, chillies (three variations), lovage, oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary and sage:
Autumn
The last few days it had been raining, but today the sun broke through the clouds again. So I went out for a walk through the nearby forest to take a few photos of this beautiful autumn mood.
The panoramas were created using hugin, a really nice tool for mostly automatic panorama stitching.
Bicycle tour to the airport
This is my current flatemate. As Kathi and Martin went to Barcelone for the weekend, I’m taking care of Fini, a really sweet rat. She really enjoys beeing crawled thoroughly around her little head.
After learning for the last few exams, Jörn and I took our bicycles for a tour to the far end of the airport, where landing airplanes pass just a few meters above ones head. It’s pretty amazing to listen to the sounds the wingtip vortexes create in the air. On the way back we headed to a beergarden and had some great local food, Maultaschen with potatosalad. With a nice cold beer the perfect refreshment after a tour of about 30 kilometers.
So long (and thanks for all the fish 😉 ),
Tim.
a day at the zoo
As the weather is still really nice, some friends and I went to the local zoo (Wilhelma) for the afternoon. Lots of sometimes interesting sometimes just funny animals and beatiful parks with the nice colors of autumn, quite a walk though.
