Re-potting herbs FAIL

Here I am, back with more exciting news in the herb growing FAIL series.  In this amazing post I am going to tell you about my adventures in re-potting the herbs, that is taking the tiny herb shoots from the little growing trays to small pots.

This has to be the hardest part of the adventure yet.  First off as mentioned in the previous post I had some shoots that had come up which is excellent but even better was that some of them had grown strong enough to be moved.  As the main aim of this whole project was to get some coriander I have to say I was very happy to see this so far has been doing the best.

Initially when setting up the trays I had used an even mixture of both compost and manure with some bone meal feed in to help the seeds grow.  However for the new pots I was advised that what I needed now was more a 3 to 1 mixture of compost to manure.  Also unlike the little seed trays the pots needed small stones at the bottom of the pots to help with the drainage.  Getting this all together was easy enough and who does not like playing with mud and getting their hands dirty :D

However then came the difficult part, the moving of the plants.  This I was nervous about.  I took a butter knife from the kitchen and gently prodded around the little shoots to get them out of the hole they were in.  This at first seemed fairly hard and I was worried I would damage the tiny fragile plants, I am not exactly used to handling such delicate objects but after the first few it was easy enough.  Below you can see the results.

All but one of the pots above are coriander (which I am finally learning how to spell without the spell checker reminding me ;) ) and the top right pot is basil dark opal.  While at this stage if I can get this many coriander plants out of the process I would be more than happy I still have hopes for a few of the rest to come up and as more do I will post the results.

This was all done last weekend and since then the herbs have been shooting up nicely, it is great to see them come up so strongly however it will be a while yet before they are ready to live outside.  That however is fine as I still have plenty of window space for them all :)

In other small side news I had some health based FAIL recently after eating some salsa that had been out too long.  This went from food poisoning to a cold :(  Tis been a bad week for my body but almost fully mended now and hope to be bouncing around as per usual next week :D

Peace, love and happiness.

Herb growing and picture FAIL

The FAIL continues :)

First off on a small side note there has been some hosting FAIL.  Photo hosting FAIL this time.  I decided to give this new Instagram thing all the kids are talking about a try for this post.  It was surprisingly hard to use.  I guess that is in part because all I wanted to do was get a photo on this blog and what it wants to do it get a list of your friends and provide you with photo twitter.  Why photo twitter + image effect plugins is worth $1bn is frankly beyond me but I do think it is a neat tool that I will most likely use more often.  However to more important things :)

As you can see from the picture above the first sprouts are here.  Those are the coriander sprouts, however there are also some of the basil, thyme and a few others all ready starting to poke their heads through.  In the next few days it will be time to put the coriander into small pots and maybe outside.

One of the great things about doing this is the quick progress you get.  While it has taken daily attention to get there it has not been much time and the results have been quick.  In the long term of course I hope the results are tasty too :D  Which I will of course be posting about.

Peace, love and happiness.