Hanging Plate Wall Decor

On my last trip to the thrift store, I found a great set of plates with botanical drawings of spices and herbs on them and I instantly knew I had to hang them up in my house. I love cooking and food  and, even though I'm not great at it, I love gardening and plants, so these plates are kind of  a nice mixture of the two. Like last week, I decided to make a video of this tutorial as well. Photo recap of the video will follow!

Supplies:Note: paperclips and safety pins are listed as items you can use as the hanger for the plate, however I made my own out of wire, so that's why there are also pliers, wire cutters and wire pictured in the photo.

 Shape the wire into the hanger. Basically making it into a curly, pretty upside-down letter V. That's all. Nothing more.

Since my plates had a design that required them to be situated a certain way, I eyeballed it and marked on the back where I wanted to put the hangers.

 Mix epoxy into disposable container. I used an old medicine measuring cup. If you're doing more than a few plates, like me,  you'll have to make a few small batches of the epoxy because it sets very fast.

 Place hangers where you marked earlier and apply epoxy to the curled ends. Let cure for 24 hours(or per instructions).

 Hang them up and enjoy!

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: 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!