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.

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.

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Windowsill Radishes - Day 31 - Death of the Cotyledons

The radishes have been growing for 31 days at this point from the day I plopped the seeds into the dirt. As of day 31, I've noticed that the cotyledons, or embryonic leaves, for both plants have finally started to yellow and die. I was curious how long these would last. They've grown very large throughout the life of the plants thus far too. The radish bulbs do seem to be plumping up nicely too. I'm excited to see what they look like on the day I decide to pluck them from the dirt. I'm really curious to see if there's much more to them than meets the eyes (above the dirt in this case). Day 31 Side View Day 31 Top View Radish Close-up Good-bye Cotyledons

Radish Season is Over - I think...

Much like shell art is over in Portlandia, I think it's safe to say that radish season is over in my neck of the woods. The weather has just warmed up too significantly as of late. If you saw my post from yesterday, I ended up harvesting some of those radishes as they didn't appear to be growing any more. I will post something about that in a few days or so. Upon sampling, they were much too spicy to my taste. I think the window of growth opportunity is over. I probably should have started in early spring or late winter but this was more of a fun experiment stemming from the shelter in place orders. Anyhow, I'll probably be plucking most of my radish plants in the coming days except for a few that are or might be bolting. They'll serve to make a nice dish of radish greens. Some strange looking radishes

My Other Radish Plants

I thought for today I'd leave the windowsill radish on the windowsill for this post. For the past few days it has been pretty dull. It seems the radish root isn't getting much larger so I probably won't post about it until harvest time comes around. But for today I wanted to show some pictures of my other radish plants. These ones I have growing on my balcony. The balcony overall gets less direct sunlight and less sunlight overall than the windowsill. These plants took much longer to grow because of that. However, they have attained sizes much larger now but that may be due to the fact they are in a largish pot. They originally were planted between some green onion that I planted. These green onions were the bottoms of grocery store green onion. Here's an image when the radishes started sprouting. This was a little over a month ago. The humble beginnings As of today, I'm still waiting for the green onion to grow large enough to actually be able to eat but that's...

The Capsule Garden

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