Bea

Before the first paid job, talk to an insurer and to whoever handles trading rules where you live. Working on other people's machines in your own garage changes what your household policy covers, and that is a conversation for a broker and not for people on the internet.

Those are the orange spots everyone dreads and they are rancidity in the unsaturated oils, not mould or lye. Sunflower is one of the more prone oils and an unheated garage swinging between cold and warm all year is about the worst storage you could pick. The bars are not dangerous, they just smell increasingly of old cooking oil as it spreads.

Compost is never wasted, so if you truly cannot wait, add it and test in autumn when the lab is not busy and the results will guide next spring. Just do not add blood meal blind, extra nitrogen on a phosphorus problem makes the purple worse.

Legumes fix their own nitrogen so they are the last crop to complain, yes. They are basically a control group you accidentally planted.

Also check whether your milk changed. UHT and some ultra-pasteurised brands ferment very differently and my grains went stringy the month my shop quietly switched supplier.

Plastic, in light colours, and go bigger than you think. On a west balcony at 38C the binding constraint is your once-a-day watering, and fabric pots dry through every surface, which is exactly wrong for your situation. The air pruning benefit is real but it matters most for plants staying in the pot for years, not for a tomato that lives five months. If you buy plastic, get 40 litres rather than 20 for tomatoes, put them on feet so air moves underneath, and mulch the surface. A large pot is its own thermal buffer.

Measured mine with a probe two years ago out of curiosity: black pot in afternoon sun was 9C warmer at the pot wall than a terracotta-coloured one next to it. Roots really do stop working at the edges in that heat.

So the compost and the fertiliser were both working against me. Would sand help or is that the myth I keep reading about?

Handles, every time. Getting a flat disc out of a pint jar full of brine involves a fork and swearing.

Weights, without much hesitation. Burping is a two second job you can do by hand for free; keeping the cabbage under the brine is the thing that actually decides whether you get kahm and soft edges, and in a pint jar the headspace is small enough that a single floating shred ruins the surface. Airlocks are convenience. Weights are the mechanism.