Daylight saving started here in Sydney on the weekend, and today was the first day back at work for my wife after the long weekend, so we got up early today. I decided to take advantage of the cool morning to go for a 5 km run. I don’t normally do running/jogging, so this was unusual and I did a mix of jog-sprints and walking in between to regather my breath. But importantly I walked up the hill to the nearest sports oval and then did laps, so I was on flat ground rather than running up and down the hills that are endemic in this area. I completed 5 km in about 32 minutes, which I guess is pretty slow, but it’s definitely faster than my walking pace. Let’s see if I manage to do this again and make it a habit.
After completing the run, I walked to the hardware store to get some plant fertiliser. We recently got a dwarf Tahitian lime, a chilli plant, and a basil plant to grow on the balcony, and figured we should get some fertiliser to help them grow. I got some citrus fertiliser and tomato/herb fertiliser, which says it’s also good for capsicums (green/red peppers in non-Australian English), so I suppose that works for chillis. Interestingly, the two different fertilisers contain different mixtures of coloured pellets – I presume they make a bunch of different colours that have different nutrients in them, and mix them in different proportions to formulate the mixes for different types of plants.
The lime tree appears to be growing some tiny limes already. It flowered a few weeks ago, and the flowers have dropped the petals and are swelling at the bases into what look like baby limes:
I wasn’t expecting a crop of limes for at least a year or two, but if we got some this summer that’d be awesome!
Oh, I also tried to buy a window squeegee with a slightly longer handle than the one I have at home, to make it easier to clean the outsides of our windows from the inside. However all the squeegees at the hardware store either had 250 mm handles (like the one I already own), or 1.8 metres! I want maybe a 400 mm handle, but there was nothing in between.
New content today:
Capsicum is the Linnean name of the (New World) pepper genus.
Yes. It’s also the common name of the vegetables in Australia. I’m not sure where we picked it up from, because both the British and Americans use “pepper”.