kiwi

Gardening

My Misadventures in Gardening: (Almost) Everything Update No. 2

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It's been a while since we've gotten any interesting fruits, so I don't have a cool new post about harvesting seeds and planting them. I do, however, have a bunch of plants that are growing that could do with another update! Here we go~

Here are a few mango seedlings I have going: SAMSUNG CSC

This is the youngest. It's just now starting to unfold its little leaves, how cute!SAMSUNG CSC

Here's the middle one. It's leaves are growing at such an uneven pace, it's so weird. That huge one is so long its touching the dirt under it, and the tiniest leaf on the plant is on the level right below it.

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And here's the oldest one, the big one! It kind of stalled out for a little bit, but recently it started to show new leaf growth.SAMSUNG CSC

You can see the teeny tiny new leaves on the top here.

Here are my many pomegranates:

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I feel like they've kind of stalled out. I'm telling myself they're just putting all their energy into growing roots, but we'll see. There are two or three of these guys that are doing really well.

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This is the best looking one. Besides the cotyledon leaves, it currently has three levels of leaves.

The tiny kiwis:

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I ended up transplanting them from the egg crate soon after they started sprouting because mold was developing. I tried to clean off as much as the moldy dirt as I could, stuck them in new dirt and hoped for the best. They seemed to have taken it well!

My teeny forest of dragonfruits:SAMSUNG CSC

These things are growing so fast. I noticed many of the seedlings were starting to touch the plastic wrap that I put on them initially to create a greenhouse effect, so I had to improvise to come up with something that would still create that effect but would also let the light in and let them grow taller.SAMSUNG CSC

This is what I came up with. I grabbed some glass cups and they ended up fitting inside the plastic cups perfectly.

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Here are the zip locked little guys. Man, the other ones are doing so well I'll probably have to just throw these ones away. Ugh, I'll feel so bad!

And here's the one I'm the most excited about - the mamey sapote!

SAMSUNG CSCYay, it's finally shown some growth! It has split open more and you can see the gigantic fuzzy stem in the middle!

SAMSUNG CSCSeriously, look at that thing. It's like the width of a pencil already. It's like a small creature is inside of it, hah.

It's funny, I look at my plants and get frustrated that barely anything has happened and then I come on here and look at my last post and realize there was actually quite a bit of growth happening!

 

Gardening

My Misadventures in Gardening: Dragonfruit with a bit of Kiwi

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Oh look, yet another interesting fruit that I'm going to try to grow! My fiance and I had decided a while back to periodically buy fruit that we've never had before in order to expand our fruity horizons. Not long after that I got bit by the gardening bug and I decided to attempt to sprout and grow each fruit that came through our house. This was limited to the fruit I managed to find at our local grocery store, but last weekend I discovered our local Asian supermarket and, oh man, I was in exotic fruit heaven. They had jackfruit (yes, whole ones), mangosteen, rambutan, lychee, the terrifying yet intriguing durian and many, many others. We ended up just buying one type of fruit that day - the dragonfruit. SAMSUNG CSC

Aw yeah, look at that. So beautiful. I did some research and apparently these guys come from a cacti! And not just any old cactus, but a tropical one. What. How weird.

SAMSUNG CSC Here it is cut in half. Man, it's so striking! I always assumed every picture I've seen of a dragonfruit was edited to make the colors brighter, but it actually is that vivid in person. So pretty. To harvest some of the seeds I just scraped my knife across the flesh a few times and it ended up removing quite a few seeds.

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I spread them out onto a paper towel and used another paper towel to scrub the seeds to clean them.

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I ended up with over 100 seeds. Yeah, I actually counted (up to 100). I prepared two cups with soil and sprinkled 50 seeds in each cup. Since I couldn't bring myself to throw the rest away I decided to do the tried and true ziplock bag method to germinate the rest. SAMSUNG CSC

For the cups, I used a rubber band to attach some plastic wrap to help with a greenhouse effect. I figured I may as well try to grow all of them because whenever a fruit comes with a lot of seeds I assume most of the seeds won't sprout so there's no harm in trying to grow as many as I can. Well after I did all of this I looked up the germination rate and apparently it's pretty high. And fast. Oh boy are they fast. Before I went to bed that night I looked at the zip lock seeds and there was ALREADY signs of growth. About half of the seeds were already split with a small white root just starting to poke through. And just one day later the cup seeds started poking through the soil. Amazing. It was very satisfying to watch these things grow over the week. And that brings us to now. Here's one of the cups as of today:

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So cute! And the zip lock ones:SAMSUNG CSC

They've grown so much! I'm probably going to have to just toss these guys out though since the seeds that I threw in the soil are doing so well. Sad, but it was still fun to watch them grow in the bag!

These guys were the perfect fruit to try to grow for me. I'm so impatient so germinating slow seeds is like torture (I'm looking at you, avocado and mamey sapote). But these guys sprouted so fast, it was fun to wake up and see how much growth had occurred overnight. Now I'm hoping that they don't stall out like my pomegranates did.

And before I finish up this post I wanted to include a photo of my kiwi seeds I briefly mentioned a few weeks ago.SAMSUNG CSCI planted at least one seed in each section of the egg carton. I was surprised I got that many seeds to sprout (as of today the count is 10). These guys took about 3 weeks to start sprouting. Quite a difference compared to the dragonfruit.