repotted

Before and after, left-to-right: I repotted lemon tree 4.0 last weekend. We upgraded her from a 10-inch pot to a 14-incher. For those who are new here (that’d be everyone), this is a plant that I’ve been growing since last winter from a seed, with the intention of someday living somewhere I can transplant it straight into the yard. Presumably, next, there would be lots of delicious lemon eating.

The “4.0” version tag, not surprisingly, indicates that this is my fourth attempt at this endeavor. This project was launched during a particularly long, cold, gray stretch several years ago. Each intervening version was born, died, mourned, and then replaced in the same spirit as the original. There is no shortage of long, cold, gray stretches, nor of lemon seeds.

Those first three pioneers did not go to the great compost heap in the sky in vain. I learned a lot, and each iteration has been more successful than the last, this one significantly more so than the previous. Hopefully the repotting didn’t stress it out too much, though after so much death in this process, I’m fairly zen about it. I also added some fertilizer for the first time since the leaves were turning yellow, a sign of nitrogen deficiency. TMYK.

I imported a bunch of old posts from my deprecated blog for some history about this instantiation.

So the repotting happened on Sunday, and this post is going up on Wednesday. This was an especially long and winding road, technically. As I continue to find my way around this blogging platform, I was surprised to discover all of the following in the process of creating this post:

• posting two side-by-side pictures required some custom template code;
• browsers in the year of our lord 2020 still don’t really know how to handle portrait-mode photos;
• that I had to find and install some image manipulation software to deal with that;
• this particular template’s handling of tags was borked;
• and I didn’t understand the difference between scalar and list variables in TOML, or why that would matter here.

None of that dissuades me from this choice of platform. I’m learning about all sorts of things.