Expanding Abilities (May Load Slowly)
I recently bought an intervalometer for My dslr. The device allows You to take pictures automatically at regular intervals. Since I was hanging out at a friends house the day it arrived, I set things up on His deck and let it rip until the sun went down. I suppose the best thing to do is make a video with these images, but .gif’s display in much higher quality, take up less storage space and require no external websites to host them. As such, this is an animiated .gif of 820 pictures taken seven seconds apart. The down-side is that such a massive .gif loads pretty slowly, so give it a few seconds!
The next day, I woke up and set My camera to shoot out of the window in My attic and went to My brother’s for the day. Again, every seven seconds was what I set the intervalometer to do. I got home five or six hours later and it was still snapping away. Due to file limitations, I had to make a video out of this set. Which required Me to create an account on Vimeo and link it back to here. It’s a bit of a hassle just for simple time lapse photography, but My traditional .gif methods just aren’t capable of handling so many images. YouTube and Vimeo both have a thirty frame per second limit and only Vimeo allows high definition video clips. Here is two minutes aimed at the southern sky, featuring My roof, chimney and birch tree, dancing to a classic trance song by God’s Groove, called Prayer 3, circa 1993. Maybe I will discover a .gif automator that can handle the amount of files needed for these longer image strings. We shall see, but for now, I will have to get use to making videos… Shooting at more interesting locations will be the name of the game, something had to be done as a test run though! I am learning as I go.
First Satsuma Mandarin of 2013
The tropical Minnesotan attic jungle is producing again this year. This orange was a pleasantly sour punch in the taste buds. The room was filled with a lovely citrus aroma when I peeled away the skin. Can’t wait for the rest to be ripe.
New Additions
I have expanded the ‘tropical Minnesotan attic jungle’ again. I bought six new dwarf citrus trees from Four Winds Growers out in California. I probably shouldn’t have ordered them during the hottest time of the year thus far. The two younger trees arrived looking good. Some of the others seem to have suffered from the heat of being trapped in an unventilated box, inside a baking semi trailer for two and a half days. The little ones are a Valencia orange and a new Kieffer lime to replace My old one that had an unbeatable scale infestation. I aquired a second Improved Meyer lemon tree as well.
Due to many favorable reviews around the web, I also opted to get an Oroblanco grapefruit tree. They don’t get pink/red, but are said to be very pot friendly and unlike most citrus, doesn’t need a lot of summer heat to sweeten the fruit. Sounds like a no brianer to Me.
Then there is the Gold Nugget mandarin orange tree. Which is very bushy and compact, but has been in a state of perpetual drooping since it got here. It doesn’t appear to be dying, but has yet to show Me any signs of changing it’s current mood.
Rounding out the order is a Mexican Sweet lime tree, which does not look the greatest either. All of the most recently grown leaves are curled up really tightly. I am assuming for now that it was heat during shipping that caused these little trees to look so glum. They have been here for 10 days now and none of them look like they are going to die. Maybe they will bounce back after this 90+ degree weather passes. Hopefully I can take better care of these trees than I have with some of My older ones. Having ordered trees from the same grower a couple of years ago and gaining My own growing experience over the last few years, I believe that things should be ok. So long as I can keep the scale away from them.
Dancing Dolphin Vine
I bought this indoor friendly vine three years ago, along with My first citrus trees. It pumps out interesting orange-red flowers that do indeed roughly resemble dolphins jumping out of the water. Plentiful amounts of two and a half inch long blooms have come in waves every few months the whole time I’ve had it. At first, it was just two, four inch branches. After about a year, I re-potted the vine, proceeding to drop it and break off two-thirds of the delicate branches. Left with only one, six inch branch, I got it situated and let it grow. Then, one day I came home from work and found My lovely, quite fragile vine, top down and pot up on the floor. Presumably sliding off its perch on a stool due to vibrations from the construction crews updating the 55-100+ year old sewers and water lines along My street. Again, all but one twelve inch branch had broken off the vine. This time, I gave the broken off bits to My Mom, which she rooted in water and has now potted two of these plants, a little larger than the one I got from the nursery to start with. In the 6 months since the last tumble, a couple new sprouts are coming from the base of the mother plant, but the lone remaining arm of the vine has more than doubled its size. Pictured here is that vine, now 2 feet long and a shot of the parts that were broken off, but are now rooted and growing just fine on their own. This plant should be a mainstay in My living room for many years to come. Such a neat variety of flowers to have around the house.
I Picked My First Lemon!
I know that having such fruit trees around is normal for many people, but this is Minnesota! One must grow citrus in pots and haul them indoors for the winter. Thus, I am that odd guy who has ‘the glow’ of an artificial sun beaming out of My attic windows for a large part of the year.
Three years in and I am still learning how to keep all these little trees happy, with mixed success. My ‘Improved Meyer Lemon’ tree is not looking the greatest, yet it has 5 little lemons that are ripening, in this, it’s first year of fruiting. Well, there are only 4 now…
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