Burstin’ bittergourds!

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My bittergourd trellis.

Remember how I got my bittergourd vine? A bird kindly “deposited” a seed in my big pot of Japanese bamboo and I managed to identify the plant before yanking it out as a weed. That was back in March, and the vine has since matured and put out a few fruits. They turned out to be a smaller variety, at around 8cm in length. For some obscure reason, the shape and size reminds me of a Christmas tree ornament!

Now, I’m not a huge fan of eating bittergourds, no matter how beneficial they may be for health. I mean, they really live up to their name, and are B-I-T-T-E-R!!! Bleah! So, while I enjoyed watching the first fruit grow and develop, I didn’t pluck it.

The bittergourd after the female flower had been pollinated successfully.

Bittergourd at about 1 week old.

Bittergourd at about 2 weeks old.

At 3 weeks old, it began to ripen.

And 4 days later, the ripe fruit burst open, dropping part of the fruit and several seeds on the ground below.

If you recall, the bittergourd vine is growing on the fence around my compost heap. When it dispersed some seeds onto the mulch, I thought it would be interesting to see how long it would take them to grow. Well, I forgot about the birds… Not only were the seeds gone the next day but so was the piece of fruit that had been on the ground. It may have been the ever-present mynahs or perhaps the bulbuls that had eaten the fruit, but at least it didn’t go to waste!

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The first marigold

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When I adopted DG’s young marigold plants a couple of weeks ago, I thought it would be a while before I saw any flowers. However, I was thrilled last week to see the first bud appear…

The first marigold bud!

A few days later, the flower finally opened…

What a little drop of sunshine!

The bloom is smaller than I expected it to be – only about 1.5cm across – but it’s cheerful colour and pretty petals certainly don’t disappoint. Would I like to have patches of these flowers in the garden? Definitely! But, I learned through hard experience that snails love the young plants, so I have to jealously nurture these babies until they’re bigger and stronger. Unfortunately, I also have another foe – heat. I’ve lost some adoptees to the dry weather we had in the last weeks. It’s going to be an uphill battle, but I’ll try it … once. :|

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Pepper paprika fruit?

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Here’s a quick update on the pepper paprika plant.

After the flower was presumably pollinated, the petals fell off, leaving this:

The beginnings of a pepper paprika fruit?

Will it grow into a fruit? Or will something (as it always does) thwart it? I say this because the picture above is not the fruit from the first flower. When that flower reached this stage, it dropped off, I assume, because of the heat we were experiencing then. So hopefully this one will come to, well, fruition!

Only time will reveal…

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Growing from rhizomes

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Growing material of different sizes

When I decided to grow ginger, I broke each rhizome that I had into smaller pieces that had one growing bud per piece. That meant that some of the bits were quite small – only 1.5 to 3cm in length. I wondered if that would affect their growth and survival rate, but hadn’t taken note of where I had planted which size of ginger bit. So, while some sprouted and grew more readily than others, I wasn’t sure if they were from the bigger or smaller pieces of ginger – and I wasn’t going to spoil their growth rate by digging them up.

Then, almost two months after I’d started the ginger plants, we decided to experiment with an old rhizome of turmeric.

And when I say old, I mean it was already a bit decrepit – a little dehydrated with dried, spindly roots poking out. To be honest, I thought it was going to contribute to the composting effort. However, to my great surprise, it actually sprouted after a very long 2 months.

Not only did the turmeric sprout, it also grew more enthusiastically than the ginger did. This prompted me to look back through my photos to try to compare how fast they each grew in the same frame of time.

Day-old sprouts - ginger on the left, turmeric on the right

Above, you see each of the sprouts a day after they emerged.

At 6 weeks old - ginger on left, turmeric on right

Above, the plants are at 6 weeks old. The turmeric was about 10cm higher at the same age. You can’t really tell from the photo because the scale is different (sorry, I framed the pictures differently when I took each one; had no idea I’d be doing this comparison :().

So, does the rapid rate of growth of the turmeric mean that using a bigger rhizome will give a faster rate of growth? Was this even a fair competition? What these two plants have in common is that they’re both grown from rhizomes. However, the ginger has almost three times as many leaves as the turmeric – but those leaves are smaller than the turmeric’s. I don’t know. I’ll have to start a new ginger plant from a bigger rhizome and see what happens. It was fun to just speculate, anyway. :)

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