My Misadventures in Gardening: Pomegranate Update

Here's a little update of my pomegranate seeds that I posted about a few days ago! I actually started these seeds about 10 days ago. If you read my mango posts you'd know that I'm extremely impatient with growing things, so I'd check up on it every day, which is probably not the best for the poor seed. With the pomegranate seeds I was actually able to keep them out of my mind for the 10 or so days it took for these guys to sprout and grow a bit. When I finally did check on them, I was excited to see a few had sprouted and one or two were actually touching the plastic already! I decided to transplant all of them at this time.  Here's the carton before I removed the plastic. Can you see the little sprouts? So cute! It doesn't seem that the scarification technique I did to half of the seeds really did anything. There seemed to be about the same amount sprouted on each side.I ended up transplanting the seedlings into plastic cups. I poked some drainage holes into the bottom of a cup and then stuck that one inside of another cup, filled it with soil and popped the seedling right in! I simply just tore apart the carton by each section and stuck it straight in. Like so. And then I added a bit more soil on top.Here they are all planted! Ultimately 8 of the 12 sprouted. I think the other seeds would have also sprouted if I gave them more time, but I decided 8 was enough. I still might end up with more seedlings anyway because I used the soil from the four that hadn't sprouted to top off some of the cups.

I'm kind of considering taking one of these seedlings and going down the bonsai path with it. Assuming I'll be able to keep them alive long enough to do that, fingers crossed!

My Misadventures in Gardening: Pomegranate

Here's another grocery store fruit growing experiment! I love pomegranate and usually end up buying some when I can find them at the grocery store. I recently bought one, and after eating some of it, I decided I should try to grow some of the seeds. Pomegranates have a lot of seeds so unlike the mango and sapote I could plant quite a few of them and if some don't grow or some die off it won't be such a big deal. So here we go! First, obviously I cut up my pomegranate. I highly suggest watching this video to see how to cut up a pomegranate correctly. No water necessary and it doesn't make your kitchen counter look like the scene of a crime afterwards.

Look, no mess and all the seeds are in tact!

So to germinate them I actually tried two methods, the zip lock method and the egg carton method. I actually started the zip lock ones a week earlier than the carton seeds, but nothing happened and then they got moldy. So, here, I'm showing the more successful endeavor.

Here are the seeds I harvested and dried overnight along with the recycled-cardboard-paper-pulpy egg carton. I cut the top and the little flap on the other side off of the part that holds the eggs. I just threw away the little strip but I stuck the egg holder part into the top to help strengthen it, because after you water everything, the water will soak into the cardboard and it'll all get soggy. You could use styrofoam egg cartons if you don't want to deal with the sogginess, but it's kind of nice after you've got seedlings going because you can just rip the carton apart and plant it straight into the new pot.

I threw in a little soil into each section, poked a small hole with my finger, dropped in one seed and covered it with soil. Obviously I had way more seeds than I actually planted. I just threw those extra seeds into a bag so I had a backup plan if these seeds didn't work out. Here they are all planted! I saw that some people did seed scarification to their pomegranate seeds so I thought I'd try that out with half of these guys. I just used a file and filed them lightly. I'm not sure if you can see it well or not but I marked off half of the carton with a pink sharpie to show where the scarred seeds were planted. Watered them pretty good. And I wrapped them loosely with saran wrap in order to create a green house effect. Here I put it in the windowsill next to my awesome Aquafarm, which is the only thing I've been able to grow herbs in, hah.

I actually started these guys a while ago so within the next few days I'll post an update where I transplant the ones that ended up growing. I should also mention that I started a few kiwi seeds in the same manner as these pomegranate seeds a couple days ago so hopefully within the next week or so I'll have something to show for those guys!