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: 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!