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: Dragonfruit with a bit of Kiwi

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

So cute! And the zip lock ones:

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.I 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.

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!

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!