Roly-poly pot

I don't know about you, but one problem I have got with pot flowers is... watering.
A few days ago, I heard that you shouldn't rely on the "old trick" of testing the top of the potting soil with your finger, because underneath, it could be sufficiently moisty, so that additional watering because of a seemingly dry soil would be counterproductive.
What to do? Raise only cactuses? (Fortunately, one of my plants recovers very well from "dry seasons", even if it let its leaves hang down so as if to say that I eventually managed to kill it.)

Of course, you could always stick a small bottle filled with water into the soil, upside down, or use one of the many gadgets that were invented to make a nicer sight (but the operating mode is the same).
And there's a variety of flower pots containing water reservoirs to moisten the potting soil to save time and help us cover up our carelessness. But this one is the funniest I ever saw:


The roly-poly pot. Due to a weight hidden in the bottom of the pot, the pot tumbles over when the water reservoir is emptying and straightens up when you add water.
Brilliant idea! (Although I suspect my pots would hang lopsided a lot of the time anyway...)

Cres(s)t

We're not done with gardening yet.
Herbs are so healthful! And it's easy to grow some at home.

You know gadgets like the cress hedgehog, do you?
A smart, cute, easy-to-use means to grow cress at home.

Of course, cress is quite undemanding, so you could also grow it on a wet patch of cotton.

But if you're really into something... weird, or loved to do the play-do haircuts as a kid, you might like to grow your cress on a clay head...

...like this one I found on the online pages of a German newspaper (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/)


Yes, you can... buy it online (click on the pic).
The herb provided with the Obama head is called Chia (a kind of sage, as it seems), but once it's withered, you can surely reuse the head for cress.
Or whatever.

Anyway, my favourit cress head is this one:


And I just can't remember where I got that photo. Duh!

Life's a garden...

...dig it.

Eventually, spring came rolling over the country and now everyone's raiding the markets for pot flowers and vegetable plants.
Ah, and while your gardening, don't forget to spice up the flower beds and patches with stickers...

Like these:
(If only I knew where I saw those...)

Tiny garden...

This just new in:


Now this is one cute idea: Send a greeting card (or letter, I'd rather say) with an elaborate pop-up card and everything you need to grow a tiny cress garden.
Comes in three styles: "Botanical" (see picture), "allotment" and "city".
Found at postcarden via design*sponge.

Germ... any?

This is typical.
Announcing a new project and then going for a vacation for some days. Were I missed to take a photo of a license plate in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany, reading IN-RI 666. The owner of the car must have a very weird sense of humor...
("IN" is the abbreviation for the city of Ingolstadt, and one may be able to choose the rest, if the letters and numbers are available.)

Anyway.
What I wanted to show was this little gem of imbecile syllabication I found on the cover of a book in Koblenz, Germany.


Cute, hen? Sigh.

I wonder who made this cover design.
I wonder why they chose the English word (should be modern or "hip", I suppose).
I wonder why they didn't divide Ger-many, that might sound a bit more positive and less ...yucky.
But that's just my humble opinion.

A new beginning

I've been thinking about quitting blogging lately. You know, all this ranting about personal problems that's not getting me anywhere. I guess I will have to do the clean-up myself someday, and I don't feel like sharing that right now.
And yet, I'm quite sure I would miss something, if I really quit blogging...

By the way, speaking of a clean-up (and not referring to the basement storage or the attic or the snippets and memorabilia piling up in a cupboard upstairs), I wondered what to do with all the fotos on the hard disc drive. As you might have guessed by the above hints, I'm a hunter-gatherer...

I found those fotos somewhere, or I took them myself, and safed them on the HDD, sometimes to send them to friends, sometimes just to look at them myself again. So, I thought to myself, why not share them with others, too? And I could delete the data from the HDD along the way, thus killing two birds with one stone (remark: no animals will be harmed...).

((I know. The intimacy I try to avoid in not posting directly about my personal life will be redeemed by the selection of fotos I provide. Anyway.))

Disclaimer:
Some of the photos are really my own.
Most of them I found somewhere out there, in the depths of the WWW. Whenever I can, I will provide the source. No copyright infringement intended.