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

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:

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

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.

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.

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

Here are my many pomegranates:

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.

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

The tiny kiwis:

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:

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.

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

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!

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

Seriously, 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!

My Misadventures in Gardening: Everything Update

I haven't planted anything new so today's post will be a updates on all my plants! So far I've been very lucky with my little growing experiments and have had a pretty good germination rate. So in no particular order, I shall show off my plants! Here are some of my pomegranates:

They're so cute!

So a few days before I planted the seeds in the egg carton, I threw a few seeds into a zip lock bag with a damp paper towel just to see if they would germinate like that. I ended up loosing hope because some of the seeds molded up, but rather than throwing the bag away, I left it pinned to my cork board because I'm lazy. One day, however, a few days after I had transplanted the egg carton seedlings I realized some of the zip locked seeds had sprouted! I'll have to plant them in soil soon.

My wedding flowers:

Here are some of the ranunculus. They're getting so big! They're still new sprouts emerging from the soil every once in a while. Here are the freesia. These things took forever to start coming up, but now there are quite a few poking through.

Oh yeah, here's my first mango tree! It's about 5 inches tall right now. It was growing really fast for a few days and then it stopped growing tall and started putting it's energy into the leaves. They went from somewhat transparent greenish/reddish/brown to an opaque vibrant green.

I actually ended up planting a couple more mango seeds. Here's how one of them looks as of right now: Cute.

And last but not least, the mamey sapote:Nothing to see here so far. I'm not sure if you can tell but the seed has cracked a bit more than before... Hopefully it'll start showing some more visible growth.

My Misadventures in Gardening: Mamey Sapote

When I was at the grocery store the other day I noticed some huge rocks among the mangoes and pineapples in the fruit section. These things were actually a fruit called mamey sapote. My fiance and I like to try weird new fruit, so I grabbed one and continued on with my shopping. When I got home I researched a bit about this weird fruit and found out it's supposed to taste like a mix between a sweet potato and pumpkin. Interesting. I also found out that you're supposed to let it sit on the counter for a week or so to let it get good and ripe before you eat it. I'm impatient so right when the week mark hit I cut this guy open. I probably should have waited longer.  Supposedly when the fruit is good at the store, the flesh inside should be bright pinkish red when you scratch off some of the skin. If the flesh is yellow or green don't buy that one; it was picked too early. After that you wait for the fruit to get good and ripe before you cut into it. Apparently you're supposed to wait until the skin holds an indent when you poke it. Of course I didn't wait that long.

At this point I realized I really should have waited longer. In videos I watched I people easily cut into the fruit but for me it was very hard.

Cracking this thing open.

And here's the inside! With the huge seed inside! When the flesh is really ripe you're supposed to be able to just scoop it out with a spoon, but since mine wasn't ripe the texture was more like a sweet potato. There was a tiny area where it was soft like that so we got to taste test it a tiny bit. It was... interesting. It was pumpkin-sweet potato-melon all at the same time. Very strange. All in all, if I found one of these at the store again I'll buy another one just to try one more time since I really know now the importance of letting it get really ripe before you try to eat it.Back to the seed: oh yeah, look at this guy! It was already cracking open (you can't tell in the photo. It's cracked on the dark brown part of the seed). You know I'm going to attempt to grow it. I did the zip lock method, the same method as the mango.

Speaking of my mango plant, here's a little update:

A few days after I planted the seed, a little sprout started to emerge!

And only three days later it's already this big!

This thing is really taking off. Super exciting!