Remember my cohabitating cherry-tomato plants from a week ago? The wisdom of the Internet was conflicted, some saying to transplant and some saying I'd just have to give up on smaller one. I opted for the former. And lo, they both have more room to sprawl now. I bought some wooden stakes when I got the new (larger) pot, but they're too big, so in the short term they're being helped by (longer) crossbow bolts and in the medium term either they'll take a liking to that climbing wall I've put them near or I'll get some dowels or something.

I sure hope that rainspout isn't going to be a problem. I'll monitor that. There is a drain in the ledge between the spout and the pot.

The rest of the colony is doing fine too:

And the basil seems to be doing fine despite some initial drooping. We've had Caprese salad twice already.

Last year one of my spring CSA boxes included a cute little basil seedling. And I said "huh -- I wonder if I can help it make more basil or if I should just recognize my ineptitude and eat it now". But lo! I decided to be daring, and I was rewarded -- that picture is from July, and it it just kept going and going (with periodic trimmings, a subject I still consider black magic). And I said to myself that hey, we should try that again. I entered this spring with plans to buy a basil seedling.

Then the pandemic happened, and the food-supply network is not as reliable as it once seemed, and siderea wisely counselled people to grow food if we can. And I said to myself that, well, I'm not going to try to plant a whole garden with attendant kneeling-on-ground (or in my case pavement) and weed-battling and the like (and anyway I don't have places with the right sun exposure), but I can expand from one pot. I ventured out to buy two seedlings, basil and rosemary, and one more pot because I only had the one.

But herbs, while delicious, aren't really food in the sense of sustenance, so I thought some more about what I use a lot of and what is practical in pots and durable enough to withstand my ministrations, and so when Grow Pittsburgh (the people who supplied that basil seedling to the CSA) started its weekly seedling sale and one week I was able to get stuff (as opposed to everything being sold out in the first few minutes), I decided to add cherry tomatoes and lunchbox peppers (those are the miniature ones that come in red, orange, and yellow) to my plans. And because my basil seedling that I'd had for a few weeks now was not looking super-perky and the basil had been the whole point of this excursion, I ordered a couple more basil seedlings, and a little redundancy for the others (for parity). I ordered a couple more pots from Amazon to hold them.

Once they were in proper pots and getting more quality outdoor time they started to perk up, and the Internet told me that I was overcrowding some of them. And, well, this is how it begins.

( photographic evidence )