Learning a Lot

These little bottle gardens of mine have taught me a lot over the past few weeks.Mostly, that I need to be patient and that the plants need far more sun than they were getting on my windowsill.

While the bean plants are producing pods, the leaves were getting very pale and sickly looking.
The tomatoes were not really progressing much and neither were my lettuce or rocket- until I re-arranged my windowsill and opened the blinds  up almost completely. That was a week ago and the plants are looking considerably better.

One of the problems that we have where I live is that we have rather a large and fearless monkey population which if given half a chance would get into and destroy one's kitchen in search of food.
The result is that the windows and the doors never get opened unless someone is in the kitchen and the place gets stiflingly hot in summer.

Obviously one cannot have much of a vegetable garden unless its in a cage, much less put my little hydroponics experiment out in the yard to get more sun.This year so far the monkeys have destroyed a papaya tree, eaten and wasted 1/2 a large bunch of bananas and bitten and wasted countless lemons and grapefruit.I don't mind sharing my garden with the local animal and bird population but its soul destroying when they are so wasteful and destructive.

Checking up

This is a quick note to tell you that each of the bean plants have beans which seem to be growing well, two of the tomato plants are showing signs of spreading along with new leaves and the lettuce seedlings definitely have potential.

So far the only seedlings that are not very happy players are the rocket seedlings but I must admit I don't know very much about growing rocket so I might just have to be patient.

An interesting side issue is that my experiment with an Amish fly trap/repellent seems to be working.
We always have a problem with flies in hot weather and the last few days have been really hot.

The Amish fly repellent is simple: 
A plastic ziplock bag, a couple of silver coins and some water.

Put the coins in the bag, add a couple of cups of water and hang up- mine is over the garbage bin and next to a window. I have no idea how it works but it seems to.Please let me know if you try this. I would be very interested to know if it works for you.