Anticipating Sunflowers

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This was one of my last lot of stunted sunflowers. Thankfully, sunflowers remain pretty, no matter what size they are.

There are times when I procrastinate, and there are times I’m quick to take action. In the case of scratching my itch for sunflowers, I’m glad to say I didn’t wait around.

First of all, Novice Gardener came to my rescue with a few varieties of sunflowers. Of those, I managed to germinate a few varieties – at my first report two weeks ago, the Moonwalker, Italian White and Velvet Queen seeds had sprung into action. Subsequent to that, a couple of Valentine (pale lemon yellow with dark brown centres) and Mexican sunflowers/Tithonias began to grow.

The weather has been quite rainy, so I’ve kept the plants in pots and tried to put them in bright areas to grow well. I well remember growing my first few sunflower plants and happily planting them out despite rainy weather. Firstly, the rain pelted some of the young plants to death. Then, there were the snails, beetles and caterpillars that found the sunflower plants irresistibly delectable.

I call this my Italian White factory – every time I thought all the seeds had finished sprouting, more would germinate…

Yes, there are many hazards awaiting sunflower plants, young and old. My humongous Early Russian sunflower plant had been growing very well until my foes, the hairy caterpillars, hatched en masse on several leaves, and stunted the plant’s growth by decimating a few large, important leaves.

With all these obstacles, I almost wonder why I’m considering growing these plants again…

…but then I start looking at seed catalogues and all logic goes out the window…

It almost makes my mouth water in anticipation when I look at all these sunflower seeds. Interestingly enough, a few of the smaller seeds belong to bigger plants!

So, I haven’t put off my yearning for more sunflowers, because I have this grand idea that I’d like to have sunflowers blooming in the garden in time for the festive season at the end of the year. Whether I can achieve this or not remains to be seen, but I’ve got a good selection of sunflowers to grow – and this time I went for a nice range of colour combinations, as well as plant heights.

Besides the plants grown from Novice Gardener’s seeds, I’ve finally got new sprouts of the Giant Sungold, which is a little chrysanthemum-like in appearance, and the Giganteus and Mongolian Giant – both, supposedly huge and single-headed sunflower plants.

Let me introduce my first Mongolian giant sunflower sprout!

I am determined to make the best of the fresh seeds by planting them sooner, and to store them properly by keeping them in the fridge. From what I can determine, Novice Gardener and I bought seeds around the same time 2 years ago (I think) and my seeds stopped being viable while many of hers still have life in them because she had kept them in the fridge.

I didn’t believe that this would have had any bearing on the seeds, so when I sowed the seeds from her, I literally tossed a small handful of each to be germinated. Well, the giant ones didn’t respond, but a few of the others, especially the Italian Whites, grew with a vengeance. I have so many of these latter ones that I may follow the advice from the seed distributor’s site to plant them all in a row to get a hedge-like look…

In the meantime, there’s soil to amend, seeds to sow and seedlings to plant out soon. Yes, I still have my sunflower dream to fulfill.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Growing Kalanchoe as “hen and chicks”

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The main leaf resting temporarily in another flower pot while the baby plantlets started developing.

A number of people who visited the Gardens by the Bay have noticed the cute succulent, Sempervivum, also called Hen and Chicks. It starts growing with a main rosette, and then grows new rosettes in an outward spiral, creating the visual of a main plant (the hen) surrounded by smaller plants (the chicks).

Well, a few months ago, our Kalanchoe plant, also known as Mother of Thousands, had a broken leaf that had a few new baby plantlets growing along the edges. We let the leaf rest in another plant pot until we suddenly noticed that the baby plantlets had grown roots and were taking root – firmly.

So we moved the mama leaf, and her babies that were still attached, to their own pot of dry, used soil. The main leaf slowly began to die off while the babies started to grow. What amazed us was that even more baby plants began to grow as the main leaf withered more. It looked like the plant was determined to propagate as many new plants as possible to ensure its species survived!

The new young plants growing around the withering remains of the “mama leaf”.

What we’ve ended up with is a pot of very firmly rooted young Kalanchoe plants that are growing around the very slowly withering remains of the main, mother leaf. It reminds me of the sempervivum that had made people start talking.

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Garden harvest

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The small haul this weekend – a mini snake gourd that was cooked before I could add it to this group shot, the first cucumber from our short Thai variety, and a few mini bittergourds.

I truly enjoy harvesting what we grow in our garden, even if we sometimes spot them a little late – like the cucumber in this shot. Maybe we’re over-expectant, but we like to wait until we’re sure the cucumbers have grown to their full size. The thing is, cucumbers seem to ripen in a flash, so a fruit that was still greenish yesterday will suddenly be too yellow and old today. I’ll learn, I hope, soon, not to keep putting off the harvest. This is from our short Thai cucumber vine.

The mini bittergourds – that now have to be differentiated since we finally have a big bittergourd plant – have also been fruiting steadily. This harvest, though, was unusual because of the two bigger fruits. The smaller fruit is what we normally get, but maybe the plant senses it has a bigger “cousin” in the vicinity and is trying to show off.

I feel a little bad for the mini snake gourd that we harvested and ate before putting it in the harvest group shot, so here it is while it was still growing last week:

As usual, our mini snake gourd plant is growing voraciously. It sprouted wild while the original plant was still alive, and I kept part of the old vine – dried now - on the trellis to be a climbing support for the new plant. It was a thick vine, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, our Australian okra plants seem to have aged, so okra season is over for now. But, there are still occasional long beans and bangkwang to look forward to. I have to sow more seeds of other veggies soon!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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Corn in a cage

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This is what I had to resort to, just to keep my young Red Aztec corn plants safe…

Planting out the young Red Aztec corn plants was a careful exercise in thought. I had to:

  • choose a spot that gets full sunlight,
  • clear away grass and weeds to create the planting bed,
  • amend the soil and make sure there are plenty of nutrients for the corn plants to feed on, and
  • protect the area from my marauding dogs.

The area I eventually decided on was along the northern fence. It gets sunlight from morning until late afternoon, which should satisfy the plants’ photosynthesis needs.

The removal of grass and weeds (weeds being plants that grow without my permission) was and always is a hassle to me because of the deep network of grass roots. Grass looks so docile, but it’s just a disguise for the trouble you face in removing runners and roots. I was quite satisfied to place my boundary of partially buried bricks that will keep grass runners out, but not permanently, because the runners will eventually squeeze through the tiny spaces between the bricks, or burrow below, or climb over my obstacles.

It still looks like grass to me, but let’s trust that this will eventually become a big, fat, healthy Red Aztec corn plant!

With the boundary in, I put a thin layer of newspaper along the bottom of the bed to try to kill off any leftover grass runners, then added my layer of nutrient-rich mix of purchased garden soil, volcanic soil, coffee grounds and Greenback compost. That was watered and left to mature for a few days, after which, I transplanted the corn plants, added an additional layer of compost as mulch, and watered the plants with seaweed solution to help them cope with transplant shock.

The next thing to do was put a physical barrier to keep the dogs out. They were already very intrigued by the smell of the mix of growing media, but grew even more so when they smelled the corn plants. As soon as my back was turned, they had their heads inside the corn bed and were sniffing around very interestedly. So the pieces of fencing, more bricks and a couple of potted plants were added to stand guard; and, to reinforce the fact that the dogs need to leave the place alone, I used the Dog Whisperer trick of “claiming” the area as mine. Yes, mind games do work on dogs…

And the final thing to do was claim the space from snails and scatter some snail bait around. Over the next few days, several snail corpses showed that they were around, even though I didn’t see them during my time at the plot – because I’m there during the day, and snails venture out at night. The dogs have also been respecting the area – although to prove a point, they’ve been coming to lie on top of weeds I’ve pulled out, but I’m fine with that. It would be great if they could dispose of the weeds, too, but as long as my vegetables are left alone, it’s all good. Now it’s left to the corn plants to grow well and bear fruits. It will be a first …if it happens!

© 2012 curiousgardener.com All rights reserved.


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