Red Lady papaya plants – 12 weeks old

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My little teenager - 36cm high and growing...

It’s pretty interesting watching how the Red Lady papaya plants are faring as time goes on. After all, they were all planted at the same time, germinated a few days apart, and right now their growth rates make them look like they’re from different batches altogether.

The first sprout is not the tallest plant. It now stands at 32cm high. The other two pairs of plants are still in pairs because they’re all growing at the same rate and I can’t determine which to cull. By rights, I ought to get rid of all four of them because they’re not doing as well as the others. :(

On the bright side, the fastest growing plant is still the one that is slightly shaded. At my last update, it was 18cm high; now, it stands at double that height: 36cm. That’s 18cm of growth in 5 weeks!

And, according to the info on the seed supplier’s website, the plants will start bearing fruits when they’re 60 to 80cm high. That means I’m about halfway there! Assuming, of course, that this is a female or hermaphroditic plant.

Actually, we’re halfway there in terms of time, because the plants are now 3 months old, and it generally takes plants 6 months to reach flowering age. Time for a mini-celebration!

More on the Red Lady papaya saga…

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French beans, round two follow-up

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So my second crop of French beans was planted about 3 months ago using seeds that I had saved from the first crop. Truth be told, the plants were spindly little things. I had opted to grow them in a pot – yes, I put all three into a single big pot without considering that it would have been better to put each in an individual pot. But, they rooted themselves into the ground eventually, and I hope that has helped.

New crop of french beans growing nicely.

Learning from my first experience, I made a conscious effort to fertilize the plants as regularly as I could remember, alternating between seaweed solution, bonemeal, fish emulsion solution and a NPK fertilizer for fruiting plants. In my opinion, they didn’t seem to help much, because the plants remained very skinny and unhealthy-looking to me. I thought I would end up allowing the follow-up report on the beans to slip through the cracks of the blog, never to be mentioned again.

But, I continued to keep the faith, providing supports for the plants to wind their way up, which they did. But they were still emaciated-looking. However, I am an eternal optimist, and sometimes that pays off. Tiny flowers began to appear, and I thought they’d abort. So I didn’t pay them much attention.

Remember what happens when I don’t mother my plants? They do things without my knowledge, and I’m deprived of the parental pride of photographing their progress. So, yes, beans formed and grew. And a few more are forming while the earlier ones are growing bigger. And they seem to be growing to normal size, too.

I’m surprised, to say the least! I hadn’t expected my saved seeds to bear fruits, because I’d heard that some of these commercial hybrid seeds only work the first time around and then are barren. It keeps people coming back to buy seeds, you see. In fact, I’d already bought a new packet of seeds in anticipation of this crop failing. This is one of the rare times I don’t mind being wrong about something!

So, we’ll be partaking of a few beans soon. I need to start the next crop so that we have a more continuous supply of beans. I also have to give Crop 2 more space to grow, to see if my suspicion about having sufficient space to grow affects the plant’s life span, and am resorting to one of my “expand as you need space” trellises. Those observations will follow in a few weeks or so…

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Sunflowers or no flowers

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Sunflower leaves under attack by ...?

Something has been feasting on my growing sunflower plants, and I am not happy about it.

I had a lot of trouble initially, trying to get the seeds to sprout. When I overcame that, I had to contend with pests and my own negligence in letting the seedlings get too leggy. However, we got through that, too, but then something began attacking the leaves of the almost-adult plants, leaving some black residue behind. I searched for caterpillars, thinking the black stuff could be their droppings, but there were none to be found. On the off-chance that it could be beetles, I broke my “be organic” rule and sprayed a tiny bit of insecticide, hoping that the scent of it would deter them. It seemed to work, and I was happy … for a while.

Now, just as some of the plants are showing signs of beginning to bloom, something has started attacking the plants again. Whatever it is has been eating the leaves voraciously, leaving just the leaf stalk attached to the stem. It has stripped two plants of leaves already, and I’m being my usual curious self, waiting to see if they will be able to sprout new leaves and keep growing.

Sunflower plant under attack :(

To add insult to injury, I also found another little horde of young hairy caterpillars on some of the leaves of one of the attacked plants. The ‘pillars had to go. Besides, they’ve just stripped my loofah vine of a lot of leaves again. :( Since that lot was out of my reach, I’m sure they’ve all metamorphed into a new generation that will come back to irk me.

In the meantime, though, I’m also keeping an eye – no, both eyes – open to try to figure out what the culprits attacking my sunflower plants are. At least one red grasshopper has been spotted in the vicinity. It seems quite alert to humans in the area, because every time I get near it, even though I don’t see it, it flies off, catching my attention in the process. Is that a sign of a guilty conscience, I wonder?

Could the culprit also be snails or slugs? Because I’ve noticed a gooey substance on the stems – but that could be plant sap. Nevertheless, I’m going to put out some snail pellets, just in case.

Or could they be the beetles that fly out at dusk? I have no idea!

It’s really frustrating that this is happening just as the plants are reaching maturity – can you see the flower forming at the apex of the stem in the second photo? There are a few more sunflower plants that are still untouched, and a little more matured. Barring any more disasters like the very heavy rain that broke the stem of one plant, I’m hoping to be able to post some nice pictures of sunflowers blooming in the near future. Wish me luck!

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The roselle sprout

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Little roselle sprout growing from the pod still within the fruit!

I’ve heard about this happening, had hoped to see it happen, and have had my wish granted.

There are two roselle plants growing in our garden and I had decided to let the first fruits go to seed so that I could start growing several hopefully strong, healthy plants from them, because I didn’t know how old the cuttings were when I got them, and how long they would last.

My only conundrum was knowing when to extract the pod from the fruit for this, and I was keeping an eye on the plant that had produced the first fruit. From what I could see, the round pod inside had changed colour from green to brown, but I still wasn’t sure when to extract it.

In the meantime, the second plant had also produced a fruit, and I watched it as well, but not as closely as the first. As in the case of my loofah vine, the second plant did something while I wasn’t looking – a seed sprouted inside the pod! – and the first plant is still doing nothing.

This probably happened because we’ve had a bit of rain lately, and the water accumulated inside the calyx had provided the right conditions for germination to take place. Now I’m curious to see if more sprouts will appear, and what will happen if I just leave the plant alone. You know how I get a kick out of watching Mother Nature in action…

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