Thursday, November 22, 2012

New Videos of Our Grow Room

 
We took some quick video tours of our grow room. We will be posting some new ones soon with a description of each plant. We are hoping to expand with more herbs as well as some exotics soon. Let us know what you think.
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Seeds of the Month Club

Seeds of the Month Club
 
To all of our gardening friends, we want to invite you to try the Seeds of the Month Club from Mike the Gardener! Click on the photo above to sign up.
 
You get 8 seed packages your first month and 4 every month afterwards.
 
These seeds are all non-GMO.
 
We joined this year and have enjoyed all of the seeds we have received so far. We can't wait to start planting in the spring.
 

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Organic Fruit Seed Saving and Growing Part 2

This is the next part in our experiment with saving seeds from grocery store organic fruit. Here is the first part if you missed it: http://rjwolfe3.blogspot.com/2012/11/organic-fruit-seed-saving-and-growing.html

We are a little disappointed in the quality of the fruit that we bought. One of the apples, the lime, and the pear were all too immature to have much in the way of seed. The pomegranate was molded on the inside. This may be because of the time of year or because they are organic fruit. But this is an experiment and unexpected results may happen so not too worried about it.

 
This is what the pomegranate looked like when we cut it up. We are pretty sure it is not supposed to look like this but this is our first one we have ever bought. We did save the seeds that looked the best, the ones that are bright red.


We didn't save a lot of the pomegranate seeds but only because we are limited on growing space. We did find out, while researching on how to save these seeds, that doing it underwater is a big help in avoiding the staining of your hands and other stuff. Also we made sure all of the pulp is washed off of the seeds. These will dry for a few days before we plant them.

 
These are the seeds from the pear. We think the fruit was immature hence only one or two good seeds. But we are going to dry these and plant them all and see what happens.

 
These are the seeds from the lime. There aren't any, to be honest. We looked and looked in the lime pulp and could not find a single seed. We think it was picked too early and had not developed seeds yet.

 
These are the lemon seeds. There were four but we accidently cut two of them while dividing up the lemon. We are going to let these seeds dry for a few days and then plant them.

This has been an interesting experiment so far but the fun stuff is coming up. We are looking forward to planting these seeds and can't wait to see what will come up. Look for an update in a few days when we plant these seeds and then in few more weeks when the apple seeds are ready.

Friday, November 2, 2012

New Tools For The Grow Room

We picked up a few new tools to use for the grow room. One of the problems we had last year was over-watering of our plants. We bought a moisture meter to make sure we do not have that same problem this year. Also bought a room humidity/temperature monitor and a pair of pruners. We are going to try to keep track of our plants to insure they stay healthy over the winter.




Organic Fruit Seed Saving and Growing

We decided to try to save some seeds from some of the organic fruit that is available for sale from our local Kroger. We know that there is a slim chance that the seeds will grow the same fruit as the parent but we decided to try anyway. We will probably grow these indoors for the first few years and see what will grow.


We are going to try four different types of apples (Gala, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Honeycrisp), a lemon, a lime, a pear, and a pomegranate. Here are some photos of the fruit and how we saved the apple seeds. We have not saved the seeds from the others yet because we have not eaten the fruit yet. But we post an update when we do.


 Here is how we saved the apple seeds. First we cut the apples with an apple corer.


All of us enjoyed the fruit and then we popped out the seeds from the core. We put the seeds in a damp paper towel and then put them in a baggie. After labeling the bags with the names and date we put the bags in the frig. The seeds should germinate in 5-6 weeks. Apples have about a 30% germination rate so hopefully we will get a few plants out of these. We don't think the Granny Smith was ripe, hence only having two seeds.


 Once we have saved the seeds from the other fruit, we will post an update.