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: Planting the Mango

Yesterday I posted about the mango I decided to try to grow. There was about a weeks delay from when I took the pictures and when I made the post, so now it's already time for a weekly update! Let's open this guy up and see what's happening.

I see a root! This is very exciting for me. I'm a very impatient person when it comes to plants (which is probably why I suck so much at growing them) so being able to see progress already is pretty awesome. I'll be honest though, I didn't wait a whole week before opening it up to see what it was doing... I opened it almost every day to check out the roots progress. It's probably not good to be disturbing the seed that much so I made the decision to plant it already so I'll be less tempted to mess with it. Most people that I've seen do the zip lock method usually wait about two weeks before planting.  Hopefully I don't mess this up!

I took a pot of soil and dug out a shallow hole for the seed.I planted the seed root side down, obviously. The tree will sprout from the same spot as the root, so I just laid the seed on it's side. I placed the seed slightly off center because I want the tree to grow from the middle of the pot and as I said earlier, it will sprout from the same end as the root grew from. See? The little root is poking out from right here. Then I covered it with a little bit of soil And now it's labeled and ready to grow! I planted it already to make it less tempting for me to mess with it and see how it's doing, but I don't know how well that's working. Every time I pass by the pot now my finance laughs at me because I just stare at it like I have x-ray vision and I'm trying to see how the seed is progressing. Don't worry, I haven't dug it up to check on it...

...yet.

And to end on a not-so-good note, and to show how bad I am at this stuff, here's another mango seed I tried starting with the zip lock method. I actually had two of them like this (one started 9/25 and the other 9/28) and unfortunately they both got really moldy. The seeds came from a different type of mango but I don't think that's why they molded over. I probably wet the paper towels too much or something. Well, at least I had one of the seeds make it through this stage!

Stay tuned for more mango growing updates!

My Misadventures in Gardening: Mango Beginnings

I am terrible at growing things. I often reminisce about how, when I was growing up, we'd always have houseplants inside and I remember having to go around and water them for my mom and it was just nice to have some living, green plants in the house. It's a regular occurrence where I'll remember those times and I'll go and try to have a green thumb, only to fail horribly and kill the poor plant. I'm pretty sure the cycle is starting again, and I figured I could record me failing (or hopefully NOT failing!) Maybe this time will be different. 100th times a charm!

I've always seen instances where people plant the seeds from the fruit they bought at the grocery store and they grow houseplants from them. I thought that was a fun, good idea to try. You're already buying the fruit to eat it, so now instead of just throwing the seed away, I started keeping select ones to attempt to grow! This leads to my first "experiment": the mango.

I'm not the biggest fan of mangoes but my fiance LOVES them, and if you're a mango fan like him, you'd know that a rather large, flat seed is housed in the center of the fruit. But how do you get it completely out? Let's find out!

Cut down each side of the mango. Be careful not to cut into the seed.

Cut out the seeds husk from the rest of the fruit. I have no idea if I was doing this right, but my fiance, the mango aficionado didn't correct me, so I'm assuming this is okay.

Now that you have most of the flesh removed, take a butter knife and scrape off what is left on the husk. At this point some people let this dry out for a few days so it's easier to handle. This thing is slippery. I just attempted to dry it off some with a paper towel. It was still slippery, but I managed.Along the edge of the husk there's a portion that feels a bit thicker then the rest. I used my knife to scrape it down more to reveal where I could split it apart.

Then I used the tip of the knife to start opening it. You know, like shucking an oyster. Everyone has done that, right? Again, be careful not to nick the seed.

When there was enough room for my fingers, I just pried it open the rest of the way with my hands.

Come out!

Ta...

... da! The aftermath. So to germinate the seed I opted for the "wrapped in a wet paper towel and placed in a zip lock bag for a week or two" method.

Labeled and dated.

And put in a sunny window. Obviously I did this like a week ago so within the next day or two I'll check on this guy and see if he's ready to be planted! Fingers crossed that this will work!