The Capsule Garden

I wanted to just take a closer look at the radish plant leaf. These leaves are hairy! I know that eating radish greens is a thing. I've never done so myself but I wonder how it is considering they're so hairy. I cropped and zoomed in a bit on an image from my previous post so we can more easily see the details of a leaf. Very interesting!

Here we are on day 16 of growth of my windowsill radishes. The plants are growing very nicely. I'm hoping they don't out grow my windowsill too much. I tend to leave the plants behind the blinds so I don't want the leaves to start getting caught in them. But we shall see! The new sets of leaves are very apparent. The first set of true leaves are well over an inch in length. The plants are just looking so healthy. The stems show a nice red color which will hopefully turn into the bulb. I'll leave them to do their thing. Here are a few pictures from today.

Finally made it to posting about the current day's progress on the day of! The radish plants' growth appears to really be taking off now. I expect I'll start seeing large amounts of growth each day from here on out. I'm really excited to see if bulbs will start forming. That likely won't be for another week or two though (maybe longer). The second set of true leaves on the left plant are definitely apparent in these images. The leaves just look so nice and I'm really enjoying observing the growth each day. Perhaps the next step for me would be doing a time lapse video of growth.

A full two weeks in of growth from the day I planted the radish seeds to this post (pictures from 4/29/2020). The plants are growing nicely and starting to look a bit more full. From the top view of the radish plant on the left, I believe we can see the second set of leaves starting to emerge. I'm excited to see how growth will look on day 15. Speaking of day 15, as of today I will be caught up to the current day finally! I like to snap my photos in the afternoon after the plants get a good bit of sunlight.

Lucky day 13 of growth of the windowsill radishes as of 4/27/2020. There isn't too much change from the previous days except for the first set of true leaves still getting larger. But wow, check out that hair on the leaves. I think my previous picture on day 12 was not as focused so the individual hairs were harder to see (plus the leaves are bigger).

Almost at two weeks of growth. I'm not sure what the typical or normal size of radish plants after two weeks should be. I read the packet of seeds and these are actually a variety of radish called German Giants. They're supposed to reach sizes of up to 1.5" in diameter. I'm not sure how well that will work out since this is about a 4" pot... But it may not even develop a bulb for all I know. It has been a bit warm in my area lately and radishes or more a cold to cool weather vegetable. It seems they're known to bolt when the weather is warmer. Anyway, for these images we can observe the first set of true leaves are getting even larger. It's interesting that the leaves on the left plant are the same size while on the right, one of the leaves is way bigger than the other one.

The true leaves are finally showing some substantial growth on day 11. You can see how hairy they are already. For this experiment I've already decided if I don't end up with radishes I can always eat the tops as healthy greens. I looked that up online and apparently it's a thing to eat radish greens. It seems you can eat it very similarly to spinach. Can't wait to see!

Now we're 10 days into the growth of the radish seeds on 4/24/2020. Not a whole lot of change from the previous day. All of the leaves just appear to have gotten slightly larger. I also added in a top view of the radish plants for a different perspective.

Getting closer to the present day but here's the radish plants as of day 9 on 4/23/2020. Last post for the day. We're starting to see the formation of the first set of true leaves. The first set of larger leaves are known as cotyledons or embryonic leaves. Just fyi, I had to look that up.

Up to day 7 of the windowsill radishes on 4/21/2020. The stems are longer and it's still growing relatively slow right now. Check it out:

It'll take a me a little bit of time to catch up but I planted about five radish seems on 4/14/2020 into a relatively small clay pot. I was curious to see if it would even be possible to produce a radish bulb in such a small pot. I was also using seeds that had a best planted by date of 4/18/2020. After five days the little sprouts in the image are what emerged. 2 out of 5. Not too bad, I suppose. At the same time I was also sowing some radish seeds in a damp paper towel in my kitchen. I have the unfortunate position of living in an apartment with mainly north facing windows so direct sun is very hard to come by. There is one very small windowsill facing west which is where I sprouted these radishes. So after five days this is what we have:

During this age of sheltering at home, covid-19, and social distancing, gardening has risen in prestige as a pastime along with other new favorites such as baking and cooking. While I decided to start this blog now about my plants, I've been growing plants since I was young. My dad introduced me to plants when I was a kid mostly growing cacti and succulents. That love of plants has stuck with me all the way to adulthood. I unfortunately live in an urban area with little in the way of space for a full-fledged garden but I made the most of using my dining table, balcony, and any other spot that a plant can be squeezed into in my apartment. My wife likes to jokingly say she's going to throw all my plants away. Honestly there are a lot of plants in our relatively small apartment. Now for this blog I chose the title of The Capsule Garden. I wanted a title such as The Container Garden but that wasn't available. After viewing the thesaurus entry for container along with considerin...