Greening my Brown Thumb

When I write about my garden, you may have noticed I often actually write our garden.  I've mentioned a few times that I am not particularly good at growing things.  My gardening efforts before marriage were a complete bust.  In one large plot I planted, I had zero germination.  Zip, nada, nothing came up.  When I bought and planted flowers outside, they all died.  Quickly.  I was hard-pressed to keep my landlord's landscaping plants alive.  When I house-sat for one couple, the lady's biggest concern was that I keep her poinsettia alive.  As anyone who's every kept a Christmas poinsettia alive knows, these are fickle and difficult plants and I was looking at seven weeks of care.  I did, but I'm not sure how.  (And let's not get into their rotten little dog who hated me.)

Houseplants that came to live at my house usually could have saved time by just jumping directly into the trash can themselves.  If they couldn't survive on water once a week and absolutely no other attention, they died.  Most died or I gave them away as quickly as possible.  In one case, I'd neglected a Christmas cactus terribly and finally offered it to a friend.  She took it somewhat reluctantly, saying that once so neglected, they rarely recovered or ever bloomed again.  The next time I visited her, only a few months later, the plant had increased in size by a third.  The next visit, she showed me its profuse blooms.  This was a plant that barely survived several years with me and certainly never once bloomed.

I learned to turn my attention to destructive gardening instead of constructive gardening.  In a house with an overgrowth of trumpet vine, so bad that it as cracking the plaster and messing up the window screens, I ripped that stuff out and coiled big piles of it for the quarterly brushy pick-up.  I went after the huge tuberous roots with a passion to keep it from re-sprouting.  I removed dead trees, small and medium-sized, by hand with no power tools.  I did biweekly pruning on the fast-growing Chilean mesquites in our yard.  I was good at these things.

When we decided it would be wise to start growing some of our own food, I was the one who encouraged it but my sweetie is the one who does it.  I am the grunt labor.  I find or buy the buckets we need for container planting.  I make the compost - collecting browns around town and saving every kitchen scrap to go into it.  I tend the compost, get rid of the mice nesting in it (or black widows as the case may be), and I sift it when it is finished.  I dig the holes for the trees and shrubs, and sift the leftover dirt for use in pots buckets.

Then this Spring I decided I needed some color.  I'm not a fan of flowers usually because, well, I kill everything, but also because they need resources I'd rather put towards edible plants.  Also, I dislike many flower fragrances; roses, for example, make me nauseous and I absolutely cannot stand the smell of lavender.  Yes, I'm strange.  Certainly not a girlie girl!

Back to the need for color.  I purchased a "Color Bowl" at the nursery.  It no longer looks as pretty as it did when I first got it, but it's still alive and some of the flowers are still blooming.  Encouraged by this, I bought some vegetable starts and planted them in moss baskets and a regular pot.  Other than a problem with aphids, they are doing pretty well, although I find their constant neediness - for water, fertilizer, and hand pollination - somewhat annoying.  (See why I chose not to have kids?!)

Perhaps it was time to move on to more ambitious projects.  I had a number of sweet young onions to clean one day and remembered reading something about regrowing the greens from onions.  While searching for information online, I stumbled across a thread on growing plants from the produce department.  It was fascinating!  It sounded like fun and it sounded like a way to maybe get a little extra food from something that would ordinarily just get tossed in the compost bin.  Several books were mentioned and I decided to order them from Amazon.

These are the two books I got.

By the way, my attempt to grow greens on my onion bottoms looks to be a total bust.  Nothing is coming up. 

My first experiment was a pineapple.  Using the instructions in the newer book (on the right in the photo), I twisted off the top of the pineapple and then peeled off several layers of leaves.  I added some activated charcoal to the water and plunked the pineapple top in.  Those little white nubbins you see on the bottom are the beginnings of roots.  When those get a few inches long, this will get planted.

I'd been craving a delicious tropical fruit salad I like to make in summer.  It is not a local dish because these fruits don't grow here, but I bought them anyway so I could try some ideas from the books.  The salad has chopped pineapple, mango, papaya (Mexican), banana, and orange segments tossed with lime juice.  I forgot about the oranges but got everything else.

As I processed the fruit for the salad, I saved the appropriate bits and pieces for my propagation attempts.  You can click on this photo to enlarge it.

On the left is the cut-off top of the pineapple.  I'm trying the method from the older book (yellow in the photo) on this one which suggests leaving some "meat" attached and letting it dry a couple of days.  Above it are the little papaya seeds.  I only saved a few and made sure to pop them out of their slimy little cases before drying.  I'll get around to planting them eventually.  The seed next to the bag is what you find inside the husk from the pit of a mango.  After dicing up the mango, I scraped the extra pulp off the mango pit and let it dry overnight.  In the morning, it was easy to snip off the top end and pry the husk open to extract the seed.  I placed it in the baggie of moist peat moss and stuck it in a cabinet where I'm hoping it will start to sprout roots.

I planted the pineapple top yesterday.  The pot has mostly potting soil in it plus some peat moss and a few batches of rinsed and dried used coffee grounds (drying in the pie tin in above photo).  Pineapples like acidic soil supposedly.  Since they are related to bromeliads, they also take in nutrients and water through their leaves, so I picked up a spray bottle to spritz and feed it occasionally from the top.  If all goes well, it will live and I can force it to bloom in a few years and grow me a new pineapple! 

I've just scratched the surface of the possibilities of kitchen growing.  The books promise I can grow out my spices from the spice cabinet and plant my sprouted sweet potatoes, among many other things.  We shall see how many plants I can actually get to germinate or root, and then how many actually survive to make houseplants or maybe even produce a bit of extra food.