Thursday, June 9, 2011

Seedy Characters

OK, I give up. Despite our best efforts, pretty much all of the food plants we were attempting to grow inside have failed. Mostly I blame the fungus gnats that have totally overwhelmed our plants. More on them in a future post. 

But, hey! It's California, right? Can't waste all this temperate sunshine on NOT growing plants. So instead of edibles (even the herbs died!) we've focused our attention instead on propagating some succulents and cacti. So much has been written on propagating succulents from leaf cuttings, I'm not even going to go into it here. Needless to say, it's incredibly easy. And if you live in a place where succulents are thriving everywhere, I suggest you take a walk after a good storm and pick up some fallen leaves. We've gotten a great deal of plants that way (plus a bit of Home Depot pilfering. What they don't know won't hurt them.) 

New to the mix is growing cacti from seed. In the little pots below are Lithops, Fenestraria (Baby Toes), and Diteranthus seeds, all so incredibly tiny that they could pull an over-stuffed clown car sight gag inside of a sesame seed. I feel like (previous paragraphs excluded) I have a pretty green thumb, but I've never tried growing anything like this from seed before. I'm looking forward to posting updates!


 
Just in case anyone is wondering, Diteranthus seeds are the smallest things I've ever seen. 








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