Alright, Dark Matter fans – ready for another rewatch?
Tomorrow at 3 pm ET (check your local times!), join actor Marc Bendavid (ONE/Derrick Moss), director John Stead, and yours truly for a rewatch of Dark Matter Episode 10. Allow me to jog your memory…
One of my very favorites.
We’ll follow up our rewatch and live tweet with an InstaLive Q&A with Marc and John. So save the date!
Came across this video today on comfort foods from around the world…
I’ve had 15 of 20, and have enjoyed almost all (still on the fence about marmite).
So, what’s YOUR favorite comfort food?
Someone asked me online and I had a hard time answering. Chocolate is, of course, top of the list, but you can’t really make a meal of chocolate. For any extended period of time. I do love pizza and sushi, but fried chicken is my guilty pleasure. So let’s go with that. For now.
Hey, gardeners, Akemi and I will be starting our own modest balcony gardens soon. What do you recommend growing?
Basil and tomatoes are a must! Plus, green onions and chives are an easy grow. Trust me, my name is Eric Gardner
Checks out.
Mom’s herbal chicken soup is my favorite!
Oooh. What’s in it?
Hi Joe,
I missed Zoie Palmer’s interview because I had to work.
I really love her performance as the Android, she was stellar .
Can I ask if it was recorded, and anyway to access the interview?
thanks
Sadly, no, the video of the Q&A was not saved. Only the person who hosts the Q&A can save the video and, often, it can be a little confusing.
You can actually record it, I was playing with that this morning. I recorded that one with Marc, but forgot to turn on the audio. Next time I can record and send it to Irena of TeamRaza to upload to their youtube channel.
Are you going to grow any peppers? I agree with the basil and tomatoes. It’s not attractive but if you let the basil go to seed, birds love them.
Yes to peppers!
I think I’ve only had 3 of the 20 comfort foods. I need to lift my game! Not a fan of Marmite . . . I’m Australian so Vegemite trumps Marmite!
My go to comfort food would be pizza but for extra special occasions I’ll make my Mum’s Curried Tuna which she cooked every week when I was growing up. It’s quick, simple and reminds me of home.
I don’t have much of a green thumb but I would recommend getting a potato bag. It’s basically a reinforced plastic bag that you fill with dirt and put seed potatoes in. It’s compact, easy to look after and you get a huge number of potatoes out of it! https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/potato/growing-potatoes-in-bags.htm
Little cherry tomatoes, green onions. I bet whatever Akemi plants will be picture perfect.
I love bread or rolls of any kind with lots of butter!
JeffW: If you message me your address, I’ll mail you some yeast if our store has it. No promises but I’ll start looking!
Are you going to try Ghost Peppers? That’s something your Sister grows, right?
Oh and I’ll suggest marigolds to go with Akemi’s garden. They have natural pest control qualities and they are so beautiful growing among tomatoes.
We’re definitely going to try a variety of peppers.
Comfort food – mashed potatoes and gravy.
Plants – Egg plant.. need no care whatsoever and grow big and beautiful, chop small, dry roast, use in curry. Cherry tomatoes.
Stay safe friends!
If you decide to grow tomatoes & strawberries in your balcony garden you can save yourself a great deal of space, trouble with attempting to minimize ants & beetles, and the oft dreaded trellis hassle, via doing it in a Topsy Turvy or other brand “upside down” hanging grow bag system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmnguTeEqWY
That a plain old hook hanging up on concrete balcony usually cannot support the 30-50 pound weight of the soil, water, & fruit harvest/produce of a hanging planter, What I did, when i tried this years ago for a porch garden, was purchase 2, inexpensive, used, 5 ft high ladders from a garage sale and laid a shower curtain rod across to hang the grow bags from and placed two large stones on the front and back, inner and outer ends of each ladder to prevent anyone from knocking the ladders over. Worked like a charm. My tomatoes and strawberries were just as tasty and healthy in size as their peers grown in a regular, upright, planter.
Saving space, minimizing ants & pests and any trellis hassles will become especially important when you ‘eventually’ adopt a couple more pugs to add to the family and want to be able to let them hang out on the balcony or go out there to pee in the morning without worry they will eat the tomatoes or strawberries, pee in the large planters, or unknowingly carry ants back in the house on their fur. The other nice thing about using an upside down grow bag is that most of the planters on the market today have an auto water holder with drip system so you only have to replenish water 1-2x per week, depending on how many plants you attempt to grow in one hanging planter.
Keep in mind, while tomatoes are easy, growing strawberries at home tends to be a task for the patient person. It’s best to start them indoors in a clear plastic, lidded, container you’ve water sprayed the inner walls with to keep it humid until ready for transplant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8EEj03WgW4 Try not to expect much in the 1st year harvest. You may only get a few small not so sweet strawberries the 1st year. Albeit, if proper care was taken in their early growth, you should see a healthy abundance of larger sized, sweeter, beauties in the second season and every season there after.
By the way: I once used the upside down grow bags in the same Colorado porch garden mentioned above to grow cauliflower, as well. With the spring & fall temps you get in Toronto, you can likely easily succeed in doing the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhFbRyL5Jrc
Thanks for this, Drea!
You’re welcome. Have fun with it. And no worries if you cant find a couple used, cheap, ladders to use to hang the upside down grow bags from. So long as you can find something that can hold the weight and balance the hanging planters that is high enough to keep them off the ground and out of fur baby reach. Personally speaking however, I did much enjoy using ladders because it allowed me to place my other herbs and veggies that were growing in regular upright pots on the higher steps and rungs of the ladders so no local critters could come along and decide to help themselves to a feast. Plus, it kept my porch ground space completely freed up for my pets at the time to move around at will.
An indeterminate variety of tomato is a must. (Indeterminate means you want the tomatoes to ripen over a period of time. Determinate varieties all ripen at once and are suitable for serious canners who are probably using child labor three days of the year.) I usually do a beefsteak type and a cherry tomato type, then maybe something in between. Look at the picture on the seed packet for cherry tomatoes to see whether you want a lot per branch or want to stick with a more heritage variety of seeds. Or just buy the plants (starts) partially grown. A shortage of plant starts is more likely than a shortage of seeds, so, even though the usual advice to a beginner is to grow them from starts not seeds, I recommend the opposite for a year where shortages are likely.
A mesclun mix of greens is great. Which varieties depends on the climate. I like to start these from seeds because they grow fast and it takes too much fuss to get purchased plants to fit my containers and they might bring new pests to my garden. The local gardening store should be selling only suitable seeds for your climate and the packet will tell you when to start them indoors or when to start them outdoors. You can work a little earlier than what those packets say because some of that is based on the date of first frost which will be late that far north. With a balcony garden, you can bring the plants in at night so you get to outsmart nature a bit and save your plants from frost. If only a light frost is expected, just covering them should be fine. Greens taste so much better grown in cold weather. Beats (which can mature from a seed in three weeks) and kale and collards are particularly awesome grown in the cold.
I don’t do green onions much, but when I do, I start with the cheap bulbs they sell for less than a dollar a pound in the produce section. Those bulbs represent months of maturing so starting from seeds isn’t worth it.
Pest and weed control should be easy in a balcony garden. Don’t use any kind of topsoil as it’ll have some local weed seeds in it. A good potting soil will scale up to larger pots and you’ll be unlucky if weed seeds and snails find you anytime soon on an upper floor. Using only potting soil also bypasses any needed local knowledge on soil varieties.
Letting a few trellising plants grow along columns is cute (if you know the paint doesn’t have lead) though don’t expect a lot of food from it. Snow peas are good for this because they are very snackable.
Zucchini is good if you eat that a lot, but might take a bit of space. It’s worth the space for a productive plant, but productivity is hit or miss and discovering you have a dud is too late in the year to plant much else. On a balcony, don’t consider bees or wind to be a reliable pollinator so pollinating with a paintbrush may be needed.
Thanks so much for this. Lots of great information!
Oh hey. I forgot to mention:
If you do decide to go with an upside down hanging planter system. While it eliminates the crawly bug and floor space problem, and the need for a trellis, you will still need a way to keep your plants growing straight and prevent them from instinctively curving upward toward the sun. You definitely don’t want to end up with an easily preventable concern like the guy in this old you tube vid had.
–> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhvIAMWq5X0
It’s actually extremely easy to keep the tomatoes growing downward in a straight line. I used popsicle sticks and bread bag twist ties, or sometimes pipe cleaners if i had them on hand, or string, or rubber bands, if i didn’t, to create splints for every 10-12 inches of stem growth. You really can use just about anything you have handy in your home or in your nearby environment to create small straight splints. You can collect a handful of thin twigs from trees in the park. Or use the cheap disposable chopsticks they gave you at a take out restaurant. Or even a package of pencils sitting in a drawer you never use. Heck. I remember one time I used a small clear plastic disposable water or soda pop bottle a neighbor had brought over when she came to visit. I simply cut off the bottom and neck and slipped the plant stem through the sleeve. I used a couple of those cheap disposable shish kabob skewers i had sitting wasting away in a drawer to poke through the bottle sleeve to keep it in place around the plant. Another time i tore strips from an old bed sheet and tied 4 thin tree twigs around the stem.