Setting the Landscape

My name is Asaf and I live in New York City. Over the past year, I have developed an interest in cultivating plants. When I started, I did not have much experience, and even now I am still learning much about how to care for plants. My goal has always been to minimize casualties, but nevertheless, I have lost many plants along the way. I have had to research a lot about my plants, but sometimes this simply wasn’t enough. Through experiments, I gained knowledge about them, but many mysteries remain. My friend recommended I start this blog to record my experiences and share them with the world, and hopefully receive answers to my questions.

In creating this first entry, I had to decide whether it is better to recollect everything I have done until now and list it all at once, or circumvent this and just mention bits about the past in tangents. I decided that the first option is more boring, but also more logical and easier to follow than the latter. Therefore I will continue with a history of my planting over the last year.

My fun started one year ago, when my girlfriend was making a meat stew, which required beans in the ingredients. There were more beans than the stew required, so they were left submerged in a pot of water for more than 24 hours, and consequently started to sprout. I decided that, instead of throwing the leftover beans in the garbage, maybe we can save a few. I gathered about ten beans, and placed them in a plastic bowl padded with very moist cotton. The beans grew, and I transferred them to a pot filled with soil. As they started to compete over space, I decided to split them up. As an experiment, I took the three largest and healthiest bean plants, and planted them outside, around June. The next day, after a heavy rainstorm, I checked up on them, and all three were already wilted and brown. I still don’t know why. One of the beans that I kept inside managed to produce a pod, with a bean in it. Shortly after, the parent bean became yellow and died (apparently due to overwatering and/or not enough space), and I planted its baby. The baby rapidly grew to a foot tall, although it was very thin and could not stand on its own. I submerged most of the plant in soil, exposing only the top, hoping this might help. The plant now has three small leaves, and is not growing fast at all. I don’t know why.

A couple months after I started with beans, I tried to plant avocado pits. I took about ten pits and stuck three toothpicks into each one, evenly spaced around the pit. I then placed them atop cups of water, submerged halfway. Originally I put them pointy side down, but this was wrong. When I did this, they still sprout, but the roots were on the wrong side and started to curve down, so I had to flip the avocados around. Basically when the avocado pits germinated, they split in half, with a root coming down from one side and a stem later coming out of the other. When the stem grew to about an inch long, I planted them in soil. When I did that, they started growing a lot faster, and soon sprouted leaves. For some reason though, one of the avocado pits that I put in soil a few weeks ago didn’t keep growing. It’s still there, but looks pretty much dormant.

After I started growing avocados, my girlfriend gave me more seeds. She gave me a bag full of tomato seeds and another full of pepper seeds (both taken straight out of the vegetables). I didn’t know what to do with them, so I kept them sitting there for a little less than a week until I figured out what to do. Surprisingly, the tomato seeds started to sprout tiny roots (since they were also sitting in a bit of the tomato juice that they came in). When I saw this, I took some soil and poured a lot of boiling water on it. This is supposed to kill unwanted weeds, fungus, and insects that might be in the soil. I then poured out the water and allowed the soil to cool down, after which I placed the seeds in it. The seeds grew to plants which are about 8 inches tall now. I also placed water in the pepper seed bag, and the same thing happened. The pepper plants are now about 4 inches tall. Unfortunately, I later tried to take seeds and juice from “tomatoes on the vine” and repeat the process, but they just rotted. I am not sure what’s different about these tomatoes that caused them to not sprout.

Shortly after planting the tomatoes and peppers, I tried to plant seeds from a foreign watermelon. I basically kept them submerged in water, like with the other seeds. About a sixth of the seeds developed a small semblance of a root and then stopped. I moved these seeds and placed them on top of soil, and the roots started to grow again. Once inside the soil, the watermelons grew stems, about 8 inches long, and even some leaves. Suddenly, however, the stem of one of the plants looked like it was pinched, and then the pinch expanded along the stem until the whole thing became thin and died. A few days later, this happened to another one of the plants. Over the course of about two weeks, all eight plants died this way. I don’t know what caused this epidemic. I took good care in watering them right, and they received direct sunlight. For some reason though, the top of the soil became hard over the couple weeks. I don’t know why that happens, but I think it’s what caused the watermelons’ deaths, since the roots of these plants are generally pretty shallow.

There was one more experiment I’ve been working on. I have been collecting seeds and pits from peaches, dates, apples, cherries, walnuts, olives, and a citron. Some of these seeds from cold weather fruits don’t germinate unless they’ve been through a period of frost. Therefore, I put them in the refrigerator during the summer, hoping that by the winter I can plant them in soil. The day after tomorrow will be ten weeks from when I put the apple seeds in, meaning that, hopefully, they will be ready for growing.