The Capsule Garden

Ah Spring continues! Well, I suppose as of 6/20 it is now Summer... but my plants continue to bloom! Most recently is my peace lily. I've actually had this plant for several years. It has surprisingly grown blooms every year too. I'll be honest, I probably need to take better care of this plant. It has grown many new plants and really needs to be re-potted and possibly even divided into separate plants. That is a task that might be on my task list in the near future. I'll let the plant finish flowering before then though. The variety of of peace lily that I have is of the variegated variety as you can see from it's leaves. Interesting with this variety, the leaves are not smooth with the rubbery texture like the solid green leaf variety. A funny thing about the peace lily is that it'll really let you know when it needs to be water. The entire plant will droop very dramatically if the soil dries out. Drooping doesn't necessarily mean that the plant is in any dang...

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...

I posted earlier about my German Giant radish plant that is currently bolting. The time of season and the temperature outside has likely contributed to the plant bolting instead of developing a large root bulb. You can read more about the plant here in this post . I posted about that almost two weeks ago. So this is a look at the flower stalk two weeks later. I had considered pulling the plant out but I figured let's see if any pollination occurs and it produces some seeds. For awhile it didn't appear that any seed pods were forming. The plant just continually produces flowers which in turn when they die fall all over the place and make a mess! The flower stalk has also gotten longer and more leggy as well as heavy which has caused it to start leaning over. I really wanted to pull it out again but I noticed something quite interesting today. It appears to be a seed pod but looks kind of alien-ish. Of course it could just be my lack of knowledge about radish seed pods too but ta...

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...

With the warmer and sunnier weather, a lot of my cactus and succulents growing on my balcony have a been a lot happier. During the Fall and Winter there is not a whole lot of direct sunlight and along with the cooler weather the plants of course become somewhat dormant. But now in late Spring and with Summer right around the corner, my plants are starting to boom with growth. It's great to see this. I wanted to take this opportunity to show off some of my flower plants. Why not? :) The first one is a type of crassula. I don't know the exact variety though. It's similar to a watch chain crassula which I also have some of but the flowers are very different. Watch chain crassula, as far as I know, have very tiny flowers that barely extend from the plant but the flowers on this crassula are rather beautiful and much larger relatively (while still on the small side). Check it out: Blooming Crassula The next one I want to show off is some type of rebutia species. That unfortunate...

I wanted to provide a quick update regarding my radish plants growing on my balcony. I decided to clear the pot of all the radish plants except for the one that was bolting. I wanted to give my green onion plants more space to grow because as of right now I could make better use of the green onions in my food and giving them space in the pot should help encourage their growth. Since plucking out all of the radishes except for the bolting one, that radish plant has started blooming. The radish plant has a nice, small, pink flower. To be more specific each flower is comprised of four pedals that go from a white in the center to pink while creating a nice gradient. Here's a picture of the flower stalk: German Giant Radish Flowers I noticed that the plant is producing a lot of flowers. Almost from ever leaf at the stem there appears to be a cluster of flowers forming going up the stalk. That can be seen in the photo above as well. I'm hoping that I might get some seeds from ...

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

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...

I don't seem to be noticing much growth in the radish root lately. It seems growth is stagnating. I did give the plant a little bit of liquid fertilizer. Honestly, I'm not sure if it was the right fertilizer for the situation. I should have probably done more research. I used a fertilizer that is more for supporting green growth. I took the usually shots but not a lot to see. There was one thing I noticed was that the stem of the radish seems to be elongating. Almost like it might start bolting. I have a plant on my balcony that is clearly bolting. I really need to share some pictures of those plants soon. Anyway it is noticeable in the third photo of the elongation of the stem.  Day 38 Radish side view Day 38 Radish top view Am I bolting?

That's from the point of view of the radish and not myself, just for some clarification. The plant looks pretty similar to the pictures in day 36. The leaf on the left side in the side view picture is a bit more yellow however. Other than that there isn't a whole lot of difference that I can visually detect. I recently paid my radish plants outside on my balcony a visit. I inspected them a bit more closely than usually and noticed among about nine or ten radish plants there is one that has quite the large radish bulb. I'll post some pictures of that hopefully tomorrow. Stay tuned.  Day 37 side view of radish Day 37 top view of radish Day 37 close-up of radish bulb