Part 1 can be found here.
The gardening never stops! Here is a bit more of what I’ve been up to and how I have been germinating my seeds.
Last year I received some random seeds from China. A “commercial sample” is what the customs form said. The odd thing is that I have no idea what company sent me the sample. The package does not say anywhere. So odd. There were 3 packets: Saffron, Lavender and Spearmint. I decided to plant them and see if they were still good and if they would germinate at all. They have all germinated and this is how I did it.
The seeds came in these nifty little foil baggies.
Now, I don’t know much about Saffron but I highly doubted that those were saffron seeds. What little I know of Saffron growing is bulbular. I could find nothing online about seeds. So I did a quick Google search and discovered that those are Safflower seeds, also known as “Bastard Saffron” as it is used the same way. Now Safflower has an amazing taproot. I certainly want to capitalize on that out in the orchard. Thus I planted a few safflower seeds and held the rest to be sown directly into my fruit tree guilds.
I just happened to have 3 plastic containers that had held ravioli for our dinner. So I cleaned them out and filled them with dirt. As a germination tray they work great!
I watered and bagged the “Saffron” and left it on the bathroom counter to germinate. You can see that I already have 2 other seed types set out for germination. In the background there is an egg carton with Black Crim Tomatoes and one with Jalapenos. The tomatoes have germinated already. The Jalapenos haven’t yet. As soon as I have a moment I will be cutting the individual cells of the egg carton apart to plant the tomatoes into cups to grow out.
The Safflower seeds germinated just fine. The Lavender did pretty well but the spearmint only has a few germinated seeds thus far. They are all sitting in a window now, growing away.
Last year I cut up a whole bunch of English Ivy to propagate. I wrapped each piece in newspaper and stuffed them in a plastic tray. I’s been sitting in our kitchen window since fall and I had honestly thought they had all died. I would forget to water them and such. Ivy appears to enjoy neglect as I have quite a few that appear ready for transplant. The plan for these babies is to plant 3 to a fence panel to grow up over the fence and hopefully make it a lot prettier than it is now. Plus a bit of wind block I hope!
I had a hard time getting any good pictures of this but I tried. I am having some sort of infestation in the house. I imagine this is a result of ordering plants from all over the globe. They are these little white dots all over a lot of my plants. I use tape and get them off. What could it be though? I finally just sprayed everything with an organic insecticide. I am a bit baffled on how an insecticide can be organic but…whatever.
