Skip to main content

Gasp! Blooming Gasteria!

Yep, you read that correctly. Blooming Gasteria! That sounds like a phrase that would be uttered by one of the Mystery Gang in an old Scooby Doo cartoon. But it's actually a plant that I have growing out on my balcony. Gasteria is actually a type of succulent and the one that happens to be starting to bloom. I'm not certain the variety of my gasteria but I think it Gasteria pillansii or commonly known as Namaqua Gasteria. It's is quite a striking succulent that grows much like a fan with leaves only growing in two directions. Mine is starting to grow a flower stalk. I should grow much longer by the times the flowers start to bloom.

Namaqua Gasteria growing a flower stalk
Blooming Gasteria! Namaqua Gasteria growing a flower stalk.

Gasteria are known to have some bright colored flowers so it should be interesting to see them once they bloom! I'd also love to see this plant produce some new plants as well. I always enjoy propagating my plants :) which is why you might notice some of the other random succulents I have in the pot with the gasteria including a hen and chick and some crassula varieties. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Infinite Green Onion Hack? Growing Green Onion from the scraps

I'm sure many of you already know this but for those of you that don't, you can take the bottom of the green onions that you buy from the grocery stores and grow more green onion! Green onion is comprised of two basic parts - the stalk or the green portion and the bulb. The bulb is usually white and has some roots growing from the bottom. In order to grow your own green onion from this you don't even need to save the entire white portion. I recommend leaving at least an inch though. once you cut that off, you can use the remaining green onion for consumption. With that portion of the bulb that you saved give it a rinse and remove any peeling, dying skin, and dead roots. This will help prevent rot.  There are a few ways you can grow your green onion. The easiest way is to put them in some water. Note that you do not want to submerge the bulb. You only want the bottom root portion to be exposed to water. Letting the entire bulb sit in water will encourage (not what we want in

Eating my Homegrown Radish - My Review

Back on day 35 or my radish growing fun, I harvested one of two radishes that I had growing on my apartment windowsill. You can view that post here if you're interested. I figured I'd give a review of how the radish tasted. The radish is also almost comically small as you can see here in these photos: Yep, it was tiny compared to my (what I think is a regular-sized) hand but I wasn't going to let that stop me from chowing down on it. Eating my first born.. er first grown. First I chopped off the radish greens or leaves. I decided I'd just eat the root raw which tends to be the most common way to eat radishes. That or pickling them. I have to say, the taste and texture of the radish were actually quite delightful. For the most part it had a very mild, crisp, and fresh taste. That leads me to the top of the radish or the part directly below the leaves. That part was spicy! That took me by surprise. compared to the majority of the root, the top was very spicy tasting. No

Growing Celery from my Refrigerator and Watching it Flower/Bloom

Have you ever had celery in the refrigerator so long to the point where it becomes link and bends from it's own weight? I had one of those recently. The celery itself still looked "good" in the sense it was green. It wasn't rotting or brown or disgusting. Perhaps some might find limp celery gross. I was determined not to just have to toss out the celery and attempt to revive it in a cup of water. I grabbed a mug, filled it with a little bit of water, and plunked the flimsy celery in.  After a few days the celery had plumped up and became firm again. But of course after it had reached a point where it was edible, I wasn't in the mood for celery. I left the celery in the mug for a week or so while adding water. One day I removed the celery to rinse it off a bit under the faucet and surprisingly I observed some roots growing from the bottom of the stalks. Interested, I decided to let the plant grow as opposed to eating it. I eventually moved it to a sunny window from