Let us bless the Lord

I've been meaning to tell you, my Hope tree is alive. After my last-ditch effort to rinse and dry the soil, I kept it in the winter garden and continued praying over it and laying hands on it. Now as I've explained before, there seems to be some evidence that this works, by some unexplained mechanism other than divine intervention. And as I had no other plan (having then not discovered the Liquid Gypsum), I kept at it.

For a while, I kept thinking I was seeing two growing tips on the trunk, but I figured it was just wishful thinking. And then last week, Faith suddenly put out 17 growing tips at the same time. Finally, last Saturday when I came in briefly from housesitting, I saw that indeed there were two branches beginning to grow from the trunk. And now there are three and they're very clearly alive.

So, I gave thanks to the Lord.

Hmmmmmm...

Interesting.

What does this mean, theologically?

Did prayer heal my tree, or is it a coincidence? If prayer was effective, is it because of an intrinsic property of prayer, or did God heal my tree?

I brought this up at my Monday night Bible study, and the assembly came to the conclusion that my problem isn't lack of faith or lack of prayer, but lack of belief that I, personally, am important to God. Which is to say, God did heal my tree in response to my prayers, to show me that he cares.

Hmmmmmm...

Well, that's an interesting theory. But if that's the case, then I hope God will give further proof of his love by getting me the GNWT job I'm applying for. And therein is the problem in a nutshell: if God proves his love by answering prayers, then I expect him to grant more prayers. Then you get into a recriminating mindset which is not godly.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. The one thing I know for sure, is my Hope tree is alive. Thanks be to God.

My troubles are over!

Haha, not even. Still broke, still alive. Blah. But other than that, my salt toxicity troubles are over. As soon as I have $16 to spend at the hardware store that is.

See, I got new neighbours, and they smoke a lot, and it gets into my apartment and poisons me. So yesterday, I went to the hardware store to get a stash of Air Sponges. The air fresheners are at the opposite end of the store from the garden stuff, so that was safe. But then I remembered I needed poop bags, so I had to go around to the pet section, which is near the garden stuff. But I walked back to the till by the shortest route possible. Not my fault it happens to go right past the garden stuff. Most specifically, the pesticide stuff. And I still have a problem with spider mites. So I started looking to see if they had any spider-micide, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a bottle labelled "Liquid Gypsum."

O.

M.

G.

Gypsum is an almost-inert material that forms from... something. Like for example, HCl dissolving limestone. And one of the few things it does, chemically, is binds up salt ions. The self-same salt ions that almost killed my lemon tree.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

As soon as I have $16 to spend in the garden, I'm buying me some Liquid Gypsum.

Sometimes I used to think my B.Sc. degree had been a big waste of time, but it's amazing how useful it is knowing some physics and a little chemistry.

Just as I thought

I'm house-sitting.

In this house, sometimes there are chickadees in plain sight just outside the window.

Also outside the window: a tree. Just as I suspected. Birds like trees. That's why they don't come to my balcony. But I'll get them yet... When my trees grow up, I'll have all the birds right there in front of MY window.

Buhahahahaha!

Set for life!

You may remember that last year, I had identified the following product as a good option for my garden:


The outside dimension are 39 3/4 x 39 3/4, so with one thing and another, it works out to just 9 square feet of planting space, by 12" deep. Also, it costs $169, plus four sets of casters at $10 each, so $209, times two planters, plus $50 for shipping: $468.

Haha, very funny. Plus, self-watering is nice, but I have to overwinter these on the balcony. If the reservoir is full when it freezes, the planter will crack. If the reservoir is empty, the roots will dry out. Hmmmm...

As I pondered these grave questions, the 2012 Home Hardware catalog came in the mail, and naturally I perused the garden section, and they had...

.

.

.

?

Ok, well, I can't find it on their website, but it doesn't matter. It's a 48 x 48 x 15 inch PVC planter, not self-watering, and "only" $80. Technically, I hate to spend $80 on anything, and especially on my garden where everything is supposed to be "only two bucks", but really, it's 2.2 times the volume for 34% of the cost. 16 sq. ft. by 15" deep, which is especially important for perennial bulbs which need to be buried quite deep. And NOT self-watering, so I won't have to worry about finding a safe way to freeze it.

So, first thing this morning, I repaired to the hardware store, and procured two of them.

Ok, so the cost was not really in the budget just now, and I'll need to find some accounting to do to make it up. And of course, I'll need to pay for another 40 cubic feet of soil come spring. But I just doubled my growing surface in one fell swoop, and the plants will be far better off with the depth and space to spread, than in their tiny individual planters. And now I never need to buy any more planters, and certainly not for $240 each.

Well...

I suspect I will probably buy a third one of these sooner or later. And I might need some individual ones for my trees. But other than that, I'm set for life as far as planters.

BOOYA!

A pleasant surprise

I decided to repot my giant pumpkin, which is getting absurdly tall because of the lack of light. I figured it could go into Planter #9, where nothing else is happening. So I thought. #9 was supposed to be a holding tank for some of my perennials: one globe thistle, the "blue" geranium, and the Stargazer lily. But they seemed to be all quite dead. So I started digging. The old Stargazer stem is fully dead and had just a few spindly dead roots, as I thought. But to get the pumpkin in there, I had to dig almost six inches, and at the bottom, I found a lily bulb.

Seriously. It looked just like the other lily bulbs I had in the fall. Very fresh and healthy, as far as I can tell. Though of course I don't know much about bulbs. What I do know, is that it never looked like that when I planted it, or when I transplanted it, and it's much, much deeper than I ever planted it. So somehow, it dug itself down several inches, and then separated itself from the dead stem, and lay in wait.

These plants are getting creepier every day, I tells you.

In any case, I dug the bulb into the other lily planter. I hope it will flower this year, as the others aren't looking good. The one that bloomed before won't bloom again until next year. One of the other two got broken, and presumably won't bloom either. And the last one is extremely tall and convoluted. It's on a four-foot stake, but it looks badly scoliotic, and there is a hairpin turn near the top. I'm sure that's all just lack of light, and shouldn't prevent it from flowering, which I hope it will do in black, as it's supposed to, but I don't trust it. So, the Stargazer may be my best hope so far. I do have three more coming from my advance order of spring bulbs, and if I ever get my new credit card, I'm hoping to get another two.

(My credit card expired and the new one got lost in the mail. I had a new one sent, but haven't received either. So I can't shop online, until further notice. Maybe I should send a money order.)

Now the best thing about this isn't so much the Stargazer, but the hope that my peony might be also be lying in wait. You may recall I got a Shirley Temple peony root in the fall, and I put it in a planter. It hasn't done anything at all. No growth, but no decay either. I keep meaning to dig it up and see what's going on below ground, but that wouldn't do any good. And likewise Deng Xiaoping has been doing nothing ever since its leaves died off in the fall, but the branches are still flexible, therefore probably still alive. So I'm thinking, if the Stargazer can dig itself deep into the ground and lie in wait for months, so can the peony, and certainly a deciduous tree can do the same.

Baobab Monday

No photos of the baobabs today. It's blowing a blizzard outside, so the light is useless, and in any case, they haven't grown. One of Zadok's baby leaves is starting to turn brown as well. The first one is still on despite having turned completely brown, so at least it's probably not salt toxicity. Other than that, the differential for brown leaves includes, to the best of my knowledge, the following: fungus, wind burn, too much water, too little water. Of course this is only in general, as I have no information specific to baobabs, but it seems unlikely to be a baobab-specific illness, there not being another baobab within a thousand miles or more. Wind burn and fungus are also unlikely indoors, so that leaves too much or too little water. Unfortunately, the two often look similar.

Again, I don't know anything specific to baobabs, but in general, the symptoms of too much water include: soft, dark, curling leaves, turning yellow or brown from the edges; no new leaves; general wilting; and stems dark and too soft. Which is pretty much the same as not enough water, except for the curling. Though I haven't seen it on baobabs before, several of my plants are affected from time to time, and it's very characteristic. And I'm not seeing any curling on Zadok.

Accordingly, and since continued non-watering since the leaves started turning brown and it didn't make a difference, I made a graph, thusly:


Hmmmmm... It went from drinking 100 mL every four days, to nothing to drink from 39 days. Right. Well, I'd have to say "not enough water" seems more probable than "too much water" at this point. And maybe I should have looked at my water log first when making that decision.

So, today I gave it 350 mL. 250 mL through the pipe, for bottom feeding, and 100 mL from the top. I may be imagining things, but within a few hours, it seems the top leaf, which was sagging, is perking up. This would be consistent with the low-water theory, because water uptake is very quick, whereas trying to dry a wet plant is very slow.

All right then. We may be on the right track now. Maybe I should water Ahimelek as well; it hasn't had water in 17 days.

And in other baobab news, I got more seeds! Weeeeeeeeeeeee! More seeds! They just came in the mail this morning, so I haven't had a chance to see if they'll sink or float. There is a new supply of A. grandidieri and two species I didn't have yet: A. fony and A. perrieri. Also, because they cost $4.98 each and the minimum purchase from that supplier is $15, I got some Arisaema triphyllum, that is, jacks-in-the-pulpit. They don't look at all like the ones I had before, though. Not that it has anything to do with baobabs.

My potato sprouted!

I suppose you might say that my potato had already sprouted. The whole raison d'être of this potato is the sprouts. Without the sprouts, the potato would have met the grim fate of most potatoes. It would be, one might say, down the proverbial creek without a paddle. (That's not true. Our sewage goes to a lagoon, not a creek. And in any case, potatoes don't paddle.)

Right. Right. But the thing is, for purposes of my garden log, a plant is deemed "sprouted" when it breaks the surface of the soil. Thus as of yesterday, I can proclaim my potato officially sprouted. Bansai!

You know what's amazing? In order to get from where I buried it to the surface in four days, it would not only have to grow at least 60 times faster than thitherto, but also change directions, because two of the sprouts were not previously growing upwards. Now the change in the growth rate could arguably be attributed to being in soil, with water and nutrients, but that doesn't explain how it knew which way to grow. Potatoes have no inner ear and no brain. How can they have better proprioception than me?

Ok, if you knew me, that's probably a dumb question. I'm pathetically challenged when it comes to proprioception. It's still pretty sad being outdone by a potato. And again, there is this creepy increasing awareness that plants, through some unfathomable mechanism, have a certain degree of consciousness. I used to think I was playing God with them. Then I thought, plants are like drugs: you think you control them, but they control you. Now I'm starting to suspect they might have volition. And with volition, sooner or later, come sinister motives.

Anyway.

You know what else sprouted? My giant pumpkin. I planted the first seed on 11 February. It failed. I planted a second seed on 4 March. It was starting to get white mold on it, so on Friday I tried to dig it out, but it resisted, suggesting that it had a root. So I watched it closely through the day, and I could have sworn it was rising gradually out of the ground. Sure enough, Saturday morning the whole seed was above the ground, then it started to split, and then the baby leaves started to emerge. As of today, it's about four inches tall and trying to shed its shell. That gives it 189 days until last frost. If it can't bear fruit in 189 days, it should be extinct.

Also, a potato

About two months ago, I had a bag of potatoes, which isn't something I usually do. Being permanently single, I eat mostly toast. But I had a house guest, so I had a bag of potatoes, and some of them started to sprout.

Hmmmmmmmm...

You don't have to say the s-word twice in this house. I picked the most-sprouted potato and put it in a dark-ish, warm-ish corner, and ate the rest. Then I googled "how to plant a potato" and didn't get any satisfactory information, except it said something about waiting until the sprouts did something or other before you plant it. But I forgot what "something or other" was, and I'm too lazy to google it again, so the potato just sat there for two months. Then today, after I had planted my orange seeds, I noticed that the potato sprouts had grown noticeably, and the body of the potato was starting to shrivel. And I seemed to recall that this might have been the "something or other" I was waiting for. Or not.

So I looked around for my Veseys Growing Guide, of which I have three because there is one included in every Veseys shipment, and I couldn't find it. And I don't have internet at home. And, really, I didn't feel like googling again. So I filled a starter pot halfway with soil, watered it, put the potato in it, filled it the rest of the way, packed it, watered it, and put it... under the desk, I think. It's now March, the time of year when plants start to take over the house in earnest, so I have planters on or under almost every piece of furniture that will allow it.

I hope this potato doesn't rot in the soil. Rotten potatoes stink.

Fruit with seeds in it according to its kind!!!!!

You may recall that I've bought pretty much every kind of fruit in the local supermarket looking for seeds, and many of them, especially citrus, don't have seeds. This makes me angry because I don't get what I want, and I justify my anger biblically by the fact that God said for the earth to produce trees that bear fruit with seeds in it according to its kind. So there. Even God says seedless fruit is wrong. So I had shared this sordid tale of woe with one of my clients, who is also in my Bible study group. But that was a long time ago.

Last weekend, this client, we'll call her "Olga", went to Edmonton. For those not in the know, Edmonton is 1070 km from Hay River by road, so we don't go often. So "Olga" went to Edmonton, bought some oranges there, and found that the oranges had seeds. And being the sweet considerate person that she is, she remembered my orange-seed problem, and brought me back an orange. "I'm sure it will have two or three seeds," she said.

That's so sweet! So I took my orange-with-seeds-in-it home last night and I didn't have time to deal with it right away. I was a bit apprehensive, to be honest. What if it didn't have seeds in it? What if none of the seeds sprout? What if none of the trees make it to the fruit-bearing stage? I don't want to disappoint Olga. But first thing this morning, I ate my orange, and it was delicious, and it had twenty-three seeds in it. Twenty-three (23). That is a LOT of seeds.

So I washed the seeds and planted them, and then put them under my bed. Citrus, as I recall, like warmth and dark to sprout, and the lemons took a month to sprout. So now, we wait.

As I wait, I started to think what strange good fortune it is that my orange, of all the oranges in the bag, had so many seeds. Now you might think it fortuitous that Olga randomly grabbed that particular orange to give to me. But if you know anything about quantum physics, you might think that the orange did not in fact have 23 seeds in it until I opened it and observed the seeds. The orange that Olga grabbed had the same probability of seeds as any other orange. It could have been a three-seed orange. Its wavefunction did not collapse into 23 seeds until I opened it.

Now this is all well and good, but now consider that Olga and I are both Christians. I personally don't believe in praying for God to do favours for me, such as 23 seeds in an orange, but Olga does. And Olga did bless the orange when she gave it to me by saying "I hope it produces bountifully for you." And it did. And then while the orange was in my care, I kept thinking "fruit with seeds in it according to its kind", which is also a kind of prayer. So the disturbing thing here is, did the wavefunction collapse into 23 seeds because Olga and I prayed for it? Or in a non-quantum way, did Olga's hand pick the 23-seed orange for me because she had a prayerful heart?

If you're an atheist, you're thinking all this is ridiculous. And even if you're a praying Christian, you're probably well aware that you don't get what you pray for, a lot more than you do. Which is why it's so creepy when something unlikely happens after you've prayed for it. Did the Lord send me, via Olga, an orange with 23 seeds? Why would the Lord waste his time doing that? But then again, why wouldn't he? Or is "the Lord" really more akin to the Q, so that when we pray, we're actually trying to bend quantumness to our will, and sometimes we succeed?

So the moral is, not only I had an orange with 23 seeds in it, but it seems to be an unusually psychoactive orange as well. 15 years from now when my 23 orange trees bear fruit, I can become gruesomely rich selling 100% legal psychedelic oranges. BOOYA!

Baobab Tuesday

Finally, some peace and quiet. As much as I like my little autistic friends, this whole "having a life" thing is totally interfering with the life I had before I had a life.

So, baobabs.

The baobabs have not grown this week. In fact, because I've been measuring to the top of the top leaf, and the top leaf comes out pointing up and then relaxes to the side, I'm getting lower numbers this week. Other than that:



Not much change from last week, really, except:


Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Zadok has a brown leaf! Noooooooooooooooooo!

That's horrible. Of course trees can survive a brown leaf here and there, but it's not a sign of health and happiness. In fact, the top two reasons I know for leaves turning brown are too much water and salt toxicity. Boohoohoo I'm so sad!

On the other hand, I may have a simple answer to the question of why they're not getting any taller, thusly:


Yes, I make spreadsheets of my baobabs' growth. You're gonna make something of it?

So anyway, notice that they both topped out at the same time. And this corresponds to when it got sunny (somewhat) and I decided that sunlight was better for them than the lamp, despite evidence to the contrary, and I let them sit in the winter garden all day instead of under then lamp. Therefore, if I put them back under the lamp, they should at least start growing again, which can only be an advantage against whatever is turning the leaves brown.

They better not die, dagnabit. I'm not wasting two perfectly good prophet names on trees just to watch them die.

Baobab Monday is postponed

Apparently, Monday is not a good day for baobab updates either. I'll have to get around to it... as soon as I can. Or something. Kthxbai.

Why are you thriving?

This is my passiflora edulis that I planted last year from seeds that came out of a passion fruit. It's the only plant in the house that's really rocking it right now. Why? I've done nothing right with it. I don't even know what it needs, and I've never tried to find out. I've watered it on the other plants' schedule. I haven't given it any extra light. I haven't prayed over it.

Maybe my other plants are just letting themselves die of aggravation because of my fussing?

They're watching me!

These are my monitor plants. The planter contains holly seeds, which can take three years to sprout, if they don't die in the mean time. So to monitor soil conditions while we wait, I planted some of the Insanity seeds I harvested from the Wall of Insanity last year.

As of yesterday, all the vines were leaning towards the window, but I noticed one of them had begun twining around another, so they're at the age where they need a stake. But as you can see, I put the stake behind the vines. Insofar that a plant has a front and a back. And as of this morning, as you can see, not only one vine has reached the stake already, but several are leaning away from the light and towards the stake.

What in the world?

Theoretically, plants have no eyes, brain, mouths or ears. Yet evidently, they were quickly able to detect the presence of the stake and redirect to take advantage of it, so they must have something about them that can see what I'm doing, strategise, and communicate.

That's disturbing.

Baobab Monday

I repotted Mad' 1 this weekend. I was going to anyway, as it was tall enough and I was just waiting for my paycheque to buy a new planter. Then on Friday morning as I was setting it on the kitchen counter to water it, I turned my head to look for the watering cup, missed the counter, and dropped my baobab on the floor.

Gasp!!!

The baobab is ok, but the whole dirt ball got dumped out of the pot, showing that its roots were indeed at the bottom already, so it was definitely time to repot.

So, I hie me to the store, where the model of planter I was after was, luckily, on sale. I bought the four pleasant-coloured ones and left only one headache-green one for the next sucker. Booya! Anyway. Round up soil, perlite, tubing. Bake dung and soil. The dung was fine, the soil got up to 200 degrees and though I stabilised it there, I couldn't get the temperature down, so finally after 20 minutes I stirred it, and then the temperature dropped to 140. So on the one hand, it was too high, and on the other, it was high enough long enough. Great, I messed up both criteria of pasteurising soil.

Whatever. I doubt it did any harm. Scoop into planter, add perlite, mix, add bone meal, insert baobab, voila. Now I have two baobabs with nice roots in "permanent" planters. Groovy! Accordingly, I've decided that they seem likely to live a while, and therefore I gave them names. Za 7 is now Zadok, and Mad' 1 is now Ahimelek.

The current measurements are: Zadok (on the right in the picture), 8 1/2 tall and 7 1/2 wide; Ahimelek (left), 7 tall and 3 3/4 wide.

Bansai!

Stop being metaphorical!

My Hope tree is not improving so far. It has no leaves left, which makes it harder to gauge its health, but it does have three live branch-tips, and the ends are still slowly dying. I think I've cut off nearly an inch from each this week. If the branch tips stop dying, it might recover; otherwise it will die.

In a sense, it's "just a tree" and I can always plant another one. On the other hand, Hope and Faith have always been disturbingly true to their names. Faith conquers all things; Hope has always been fragile. So what happens if Hope dies? And more metaphysically, is Hope dying because of the rather hopeless state of things in mt present situation, or is it just a coincidence? If I get the way better job I'm applying for, will Hope get better?

I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Another good reason to garden

The last two weeks have sucked, the details of which are beyond the scope of this blog but can be summarised thusly: Dunning-Kruger effect, and snakes. There are no biological snakes in Hay River; you know why? Because they got out-competed by all the metaphorical snakes.

The point is, on Wednesday I was in a bad mood, so I decided to sprout something. But what? All my seeds are hard to sprout and I'm getting fed up with them. So, I bought some cat grass seeds. Grass sprouts almost instantly. So I seeded a dozen or so, and waited.

Friday night when I came home from another day of snake oil, snake charming, and other snakiness, my grass seeds had sprouted. Aaaaaaaah... I feel better already.

So the reason one should garden is, people are assholes, plants are just plants. You can never trust a person, but you can trust a plant.

Rather Heath Robinson

I don't know if anyone says "Heath Robinson" other than David Attenborough, but since I watch a lot of Attenborough, I get to say "Heath Robinson". It actually means something. Google it.

Anyway:


Here you see Hope, having completed its shower and drainage. Draining all the water took an absurdly long time because the drainage holes are tiny and were plugged. I suspected so, but left it overnight anyway before I did anything about it. That's dumb. In the morning there was still standing water above the soil, so I poked the drainage holes with a pin, and thus flooded my bathroom with run-off. That was dumb...

That being done, though, I still needed to dry the ground, not just drain it. On closer inspection, almost all the plants in the winter garden are over-watered; except maybe the lilies and the dormant peony. (I have a gripe about the peony, but that's for another post.) I think I've explained this about lemon trees before, but since I don't expect you to memorise my blog, I'll explain again. Lemon trees are heavy feeders but they hate water. Unfortunately, most fertilizers have to be mixed with water, so it's easy for lemons to be underfed, overwatered, or both. And now that I know about ion toxicity, there is another problem: as the water is absorbed or evaporates, the concentration of ions in the soil increases, leading to toxicity.

So you see, there are actually three contradictory yet concomitant problems: not enough nutrients → need water to mix fertilizer → overwatered → let the ground dry out → ion toxicity.

Hmmmm...

Well, to get back to my Heath Robinson thing, in the photo above you can see Hope after shower and draining. The little white thing is a space heater which I used to apply heat to the bottom, to help it dry. It's sitting on an inverted salad bowl, because experience shows that setting it directly on the carpet causes it to overheat rapidly through lack of air circulation. The tall white thing, obviously, is a fan. You may not know this, but one of the many very useful things I've learned in construction is, air flow is more useful in drying than heat. If you have heat, moisture, and no air flow, you get mold. If you have cold, moisture, and good air flow, you get drying.

In short, this is me trying to dry out the soil before Hope suffers from the excess water. If there are still too many harmful ions in the soil, that will bring me back to the problem of ion toxicity, so I sure hope I rinsed it enough. If not, the only remaining option will be to dump it out, knock off as much soil as possible, and repot it with new soil; but then it would also suffer from having its roots disturbed.

I'd like to believe that if Stalin could grow a lemon tree, so can I; but then again Stalin planted his in the ground somewhere in the Caucasus, not in a planter north of 60.

Zut alors

I decided to throw out the moldy seeds in the hot house kit and start over. So I boiled some water and threw in one A. grandidieri..

It floated.

Hmmmmmm...

Long story short:


All four seeds float. And if I'm not mistaken, so did the first one.

And yes, it does matter, because normally live seeds sink. Seeds that float are dead. And I'll spare you the photos, which I haven't even shot anyway, but I did put these four seeds in growing medium anyway, and now they have both white and green mold on them. Now maybe I didn't clean the tray properly after throwing out the last batch, but I don't think that's the problem, because there are three varieties of seeds in there, and the problems seem to run by type.

The other two types, for the record, are coffee and kwyjibo. The coffee seeds also all floated. They always seemed too light to me anyway. The kwyjibo, which is my last kwyjibo seed, sank. Inshallah, maybe it will sprout yet.

And the moral is, obviously, that I need more A. grandidieri seeds.

Cat ladies got nothing on me

Except a few cats, I guess.

Consider the following. At first, back in summer 2009, I had plants on my balcony.

Then I had plants in my living room.

Then I had plants in my kitchen.

Then I had plants in my fridge.

Then I had plants on my night stand.

Then I had plants in my bathroom.

Then I had plants in my shower.

I should take up growing mushrooms, then I could put the closets to good use as well.

But that's not all!

I'm considering moving to a bigger apartment. So I'll have more room for my plants.

Now what?

Having (maybe) solved the lemon tree mystery, I can now turn my attention to this:




This is one of my pear trees. It looks like spider mites, but it could also be mosaic virus. This one is the most affected, but three out of four are not putting out new leaves. I flooded them last weekend and fertilized them with tomato product as well. In their case the flooding wasn't to clean the soil, though it's not a bad idea, but to rehydrate it. Since they've been dormant all winter, I haven't watered them much, and the soil dried to such an extent that it had formed hard clumps that wouldn't admit water. There is a reason, after all, why mud-brick construction is one of the three oldest building techniques in the world.

But back to my point, the soil wasn't really taking water anymore, it would simply run right through, leaving everything nearly as dry as before. So I put the planters in the kitchen sink and ran the water until the sink was nearly full. Even so, I had to dig through and through with a fork, break up the clumps, and mix the dry dirt with water by hand. After all that, the healthiest tree put out new leaves; the other three showed some light greenery, but none of it actually turned into leaves.

You can see on the second photo here that the one tree has been putting out a long, thick, light green stem with little growths on it; yet it still doesn't make leaves.

What you can also see, even though the focus is on the tree and not on the parasites, is those little white dots. When you see them with the naked eye, they're actually tiny creatures. I still think spider mites, since they make spider-like webs, but it could be thrips or aphids or who knows what. My balcony being out of reach of most vermin, I'm not versed in plant parasites. Yet.

I've rinsed this tree a couple of times, but they keep coming back, so then I remembered something else I think I've read about spider mites: they don't like humid conditions. So...

(011)
I made a cloche with a stake and a garbage bag, and now it's sitting in the bathroom, the warmest, humidest part of the house. Hopefully this will steam out the creatures. And hopefully the creatures are the cause of the weird growth and the mottled leaves, because if it's mosaic virus, I'll have to destroy all four trees. The fact that it hasn't spread to anything else in the house makes me optimistic, but you never know.