Gardening update - September 19, 2016

The first thing I want to do is apologize for being so inactive over the last six months or so. I am pretty sure I posted this on Facebook, but here it is for those of you here.

Jenn and I had split up back in February and I moved in with a friend. Most of my plants went to Jenn's place and a lot of the seedlings went into the trash/compost bucket. I took a few here with me, but only two have survived and one of those is on its last leg, as well.

The two that I have now are a tomato plant (not sure which one) and a pepper plant. Both are in small plastic cups. The tomato plant has lost all of its leaves and is in its death throes.

I had a small basil cutting from the original basil plant, but that died for unknown reasons.

I had tomato plants in 2L Coke bottles, but those also died because I forgot to cut drainage holes and they drowned in a typhoon.

Simply put, most everything has died due to neglect as I focused my time and attention on rebuilding my life.

The plants at Jenn's house

As for the plants at Jenn's house, those are mostly dead, as well. I had asked that they water them, but obviously that was too much to ask and just about everything there died, as well.

I am planning to move into my own place soon and when I do I will restart my garden.

I have a drawer full of seeds that I have been collecting over time, so I should get a good headstart.

The grape experiment

A few months back we had purchased some grapes in the store. They were pretty big grapes and I saved a lot of seeds. I tried to sprout them, but with no luck. I found out later that the reason is because grape seeds need to go through a cold period before they will sprout.  In short, I should have put them in the fridge for a couple of months to simulate winter. Oh well. Lesson learned.

In conclusion

As I said, when I move into my own place I will restart my gardening efforts. So, there will be more to come. Just give me a few months to get there. Also, all those videos I took from before I split with Jenn, I will make an effort to get those uploaded to YouTube.

Growing Romaine Lettuce from seed

December 29, 2015

I was going stir crazy sitting in the house, so I took a ride to the mall. I didn't really need anything nor did I have an agenda. I was really just going to walk around and browse. As usual, I ended up in Ace Hardware. IMAGINE THAT!  I get there so infrequently that when I do go I tend to just look at every aisle. Naturally, I discovered the gardening aisle. Much to my chagrin it was not a gardening section. Oh well. So, I took a few minutes to look at all the products and when I turned to look at the products on the shelf behind me....BINGO!  Seeds!

At this point I want to add a bit of backstory. I have been looking for certain seeds for a while now. Lettuce seeds was definitely high up on that list. We don't exactly have too many nurseries in this area, so I was checking sites online. I was hesitant to buy from a Filipino online seed dealer because the prices were almost double what they should have been. Add in shipping and handling and you lost me as a customer.  So, when I saw lettuce on that hook, I immediately grabbed a pack.

I looked around a bit more and considered a few of the other seeds, but in the end the lettuce was the only seeds I bought.  I also bought some coconut coir to mix into my soil to loosen it up and to help it to hold moisture better. The last thing I purchased was a new spray bottle because my old one got broken. This turned out to be a blessing because the new one is bigger than the old one.

Getting back on topic, as I write this I realized I won't be planting these right away. I need to make some nitrogen rich compost first. Well, I guess technically I don't have to, but I would like to have it ready to go. Maybe I will do a test batch. Well, whatever I decide you can be assured that I will post updates.