Pineapple

In the summer while visiting a friend he made fresh fruit salad which included Pineapple. I asked him for the top and took it home, After removing the remains of the fruit and also a few of the lower leaves I suspended it in a container with water so that it cover the lower part of the base. Slowly roots appeared and when I thought there were enough I put it into a pot with some soil. In the photo below you can see some months later the resulting plant.

My research tells me that I didn't need to do the water trick but could have just planted it straight into the soil, but for me it was nice to see the roots form.. Pineapple is from the Bromeliad family and to water them it is best to fill the cup in the leaves from time to time.It should produce a fruit in maybe 18 months time and then it will also produce a pup which can be removed and planted up. They produce only 1 fruit a year but if you keep removing and potting up the pups you can soon have a good supply of fruit to enjoy or share with friends.

Orange grove

You may remember that last year I managed to get 5 orange seeds to germinate and get them through the winter indoors. Well during the summer 2 of them decided they didn't want to go on,as is their want. So it is a little over a year later and as you will see from the photo's they have become my little orange grove :) .

Hopefully they are now established enough to get through another winter and in the Spring I will move them on into bigger pots.

Falling into Autumn

Over the next few months we can start to think about preparing for the new year. One of the things that can be done is to take cuttings of some of your favourite plants.

Here is a cutting that I took recently and rooted in water, then potted into a general soil mix.

This is an example of the same plant 6 to 8 months after taking and rooting a cutting. In fact the rooted cutting above was taken from this plant just a few weeks ago.
Some plants will root easily and quickly, others will require a little patience, but the results can be well worth the wait :)

The balcony garden

I just wanted to show you what is happening on my balcony. As you can see it is quite small and now it is crowded with plants. There is a mixture of flowering plants, also some Tomato, sweet peppers and ornamental squash, I have lettuce, which provide me with green salad and also an addition to my sandwiches. You can also see that I utilize various milk containers, it's good to recycle and re-use. :)

Salad days

So on my balcony I have a small garden which includes some Lettuce and Tomato, around 7 plants of each. I have been cutting leaves from the lettuce and making small green salad a very nice treat :) . Some of the tomato plants are just starting to show flower buds, so maybe next month I will have some of those to add.
I  have just started some new lettuce seedlings to maintain a continuation. The weather has not been too warm so far and we have been getting regular rain showers so things are progressing nicely. I hope they are with you too :) .

Avocado too

In December I found a bag with 5 Avocado seeds in it which I had for more than a year. They were pretty moldy, but I found one that I thought was ok and put it in a pot and nothing seems to happen. Then a couple of weeks ago I thought to maybe  throw it out and use the pot and then noticed a small root, so I started to water it again and now you see in the photo, ( the one that looks like a great white shark eating a fish ) that it is finally send up a shoot. It took about 5 months for it to spring into life, but is a fine example of patience in the gardening world.:)

Rosemary

 When I moved to Sarajevo last May while out on a run I took 5 cuttings from a Rosemary bush, Rosmarinus Officinalis to use it's latin name. They were all similar to the one seen to the left. I put them in a cup filled with water and left them. Topping up the water level as needed. It took a little while but eventually roots began to appear. I waited until there were quite a few roots and then potted them up in separate pots in a general soil mix.
Over the summer they stayed outside on my balcony and when the weather got colder I brought them inside, pinching out the tips and using them in my cooking.

Here in the photo to the left you see the result of almost one year of growth.
Fresh Rosemary is a great addition to your kitchen so if you can get a hold of a cutting or 2  and start them as I did in water. once they are nice and big you can also plant one in your garden.
Good luck and happy gardening :)

Persimmon

A few times I have tried to grow a Persimmon tree without success. I think the first time I didn't wait long enough for the seed to germinate and then gave up and threw it away.
Just recently I discovered a video blogger called the Kiwi grower and learned the secret from him. It seems you I needed to put the seed in a wet folded paper towel and then a zip lock plastic bag then put in a warm place and wait 3 to 4 weeks.
In the middle of December I did this and place the bag next to the chimney stack in my room. After 4 weeks the seed had still not germinated but was quite fat, so I waited and after about 6 weeks there was a root about 1/2 an inch long. I carefully place the seed in the the pot you see in the picture and put it back by the chimney. After a further 2 weeks I saw a shoot emerging, I then put a plastic bag over the top like a tent and placed it in a window. As you can see from the photo it has progressed quite nicely and I am very happy with the results so far :)

Think about seeds.

So here we are into the second half of March and as the days get longer and hopefully sunny and warmer, it is time to think about sowing some seeds.
It is about that time to start getting your seeds sorted for sowing indoors. Spring is just around the corner and if you can get some of your seeds sown indoors it will give them a head start. Sow your seeds in a light seed mix and put them in cupboard out of the way, they don't need a sunny spot they are in the dark of the soil anyway.
You can start some of your annual flowers like Marigolds and also Tomato around this time, Seeds like Peas you will sow into the cold soil just as soon as any chance for frost has passed.
So go out to your local seed supplier and chose what you would like to grow this year. Some of your old standards and maybe one or two new things to add a little adventure :)

Orange trees

 Last Summer I planted 5 orange seeds in a pot and left them outside where they got Sun for most of the day, watering them when the soil looked dry. They seemed to take forever to germinate,but eventually I saw the first ones started to come up.
The first 2 photo's you see here are the seedlings after a couple of months.




 During the early winter period the seedlings stopped growing, I am not quite sure why this was, but it may be because that is when they are with fruit when mature.

 Around the middle of January I made sure that they were put onto a sunny windowsill when there was Sun and they started to spring into life again.
So the second 2 photo's you see here are showing the new growth. You can see they are about twice the size they were before. 5 months has passed between the 2 sets of photo's

So don't just throw away seed from fruit that you have eaten, pop them in some soil and see what happens :)

Clivia

In an earlier post I mentioned Clivia and how they need a 3 month period during winter to encourage them to flower in the Spring.
Some years ago when I lived in New York a friend gave me a seed head that he had brought back form a visit to the Botanical gardens in Malta. There were 15 seeds and I managed to get around 11 of them to germinate. I learned that they take maybe 5 years to flower from seed. Well I gave one or two away over the years and ended up with maybe 7 of them plus 2 I had acquired as pups from a friends plant. Then one June two of them flowered for the first time. Here are 2 photo's of one of them. The following May I left New York for Europe and gave my plants to grateful friends, the two plants that had flowered the year before were sending up new flower spikes. Clivia also like to be pot bound, which is to say that they don't like too much room for their roots in the pot. After the flowering period usually around August they can be re-potted in some cases back into the same pot. When they are out of the pot you will notice there are some old roots that are brown and soft and these can be removed quite easily. When this is done you will see that they will pop back into the pot with some fresh soil nicely. I just remembered to tell you that during the flowering period it is a good idea to apply a general feed. As you can see they are a beautiful plant and flower so try growing one yourself, you don't have to grow one from seed. You can of course buy one, they can be a little expensive if at the flowering stage. Older plants grow side plants or pups and these can be removed form the main plant during re-potting, if you have a friend who has an older plant with pups talk them into giving you one, They will also get to the flowering stage in a shorter time. So give it a try. Good luck.

Avocado

This is a photo of the Avocado tree taken in the summer when it was around one and a half years old.

Things to do

When I lived in New York I would eat a lot of Avocado in the summer and a few times I tried to grow from one of the seeds. It was not hard to get it to germinate and they seedling would grow quite well, but by winter time it was never that strong and would somehow get some sort of die back disease and eventually die all together. One year I did get one to recover for a short time but then it also succumbed. When I moved to Slovenia someone gave me an avocado in November and I decided to put the seed in soil in the middle of December just before I went to England for 3 weeks. Well when I got back it was just sending a shoot. Often when you see an avocado plant that someone has grown at home it is tall and thin with just a few leaves on the tips. Well I learned that to get a strong healthy plant you need to pinch out the growing tip after 6 leaves have formed and subsequently do the same to the branches that follow. I had to go away for the summer so I left the plant with a friend and she potted it up when it got bigger. By the winter I had a strong healthy avocado tree and this winter it is 2 years old. It is a fun project to try and though it is February I don't think it is too late to start if you can find and avocado seed somewhere. Good luck!  

It's Winter

So since it is Winter I will focus mainly on indoor plants.One thing we have to be aware of in the winter with indoor plants is that the air in most rooms tends to be a little drier due to the fact that we now have heating going on. One way to combat this is to mist plants at least once a day to create at little more moisture around them, people tell me all the time that their houseplants have yellow or even brown leaves and this is due to the change in the air in the room usually. It usually occurs with the older leaves, the plant will sacrifice these leaves in order to give all it's moisture to the younger leaves and growing tips.
As a general rule I like to water my indoor plants 3 times a week and I pick Monday, Wednesday and Friday as these days, of course I check on them everyday just in case they need to be watered on a day in between this schedule. Most plants have less growth during the winter so this can be reduced to 2 days a week if needed.
There are some plants they are native to countries in the southern hemisphere that are experiencing Summer while we are in the throws of Winter, one example is the Clivia, native to South Africa and with this plant you can stop watering completely for the months of November, December and January and if you follow this advice you will find that they will flower later in the year. I have had them flower in April or June and I have to say I love this flower, check it out.
Well that's it for now. I will try to post some photo's in the next one.

A Beginning

I decided to start this blog because I have been asked many gardening questions over the years and finally felt that maybe it was time to write something down.
Since the age of about 7 I have had a close relationship with plants they have always given me joy and peace of mind. My father who was an avid gardener and my maternal grandfather who was likewise encouraged me and taught me many things about plants and gardening I was an eager learner.
When I left school I started an apprenticeship on a local Parks department, during that time I also went to college to study Horticulture coming away with a National Certificate and an Advanced National Certificate in Horticulture, but my real learning has always been hands on.
So I would like to offer some of my more than 50 years of experience and knowledge in this blog to maybe help and encourage.