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General tips for the amateur gardener |
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As a horticulturalist you are assured that everything read here conforms in one way or another to my knowledge, skills and interest in gardening. It should also be known that my cheapskate ways contribute to some of the cost savings you can make when setting up your own garden. Please humour me when I make use of botanical nomenclature, I will try and find layman's terms and names to make up for this. This web log will try to take an amateur gardener through from tilling to sowing, to harvesting and eating. Pre-Day 1 Sit back and wait for a rainy day. Not only will you be able to harvest water to get your plants going for the next two weeks, but the EC 1 water (electric conductivity) is ideal for germination. Instead of going through the trouble of doing a rain dance, why not use the time to prepare some seeds for sowing. My first attempt at a garden was finding some fridge tomatoes and sowing them, not the whole tomatoes though I haven't tried this method yet, but by carefully picking the small seeds nestled in their fleshy compartments. The how-to-sow-seeds-for-dummies would probably advise you to leave them out in the sun or out in a sunny spot for a couple of days, but my tip is to borrow some baby powder, sprinkle lightly over the seeds that you removed and watch while in just a few minutes the powder absorbs the fleshy parts and you can then store your first seeds in newspaper. Other fruits like green peppers, pumpkin, and egg plants can be extracted and prepared in this way too. Next time your by any chance in the gally of a ship and you happen to come upon a heap of potatoes peels lying ideally to one side, ask the first captain, before you're made to walk the plank, to tie a bag of these peels to your arm on taking the plunge. You'll probably drown much quicker because of the extra weight, but you would be sending out a clear message to others that potatoes peels are the life blood of life. In spirit of this stuff a handful of potatoes peels into a cupboard and in about a weeks time they're eyes would've sprouted a radical nub. |
| Potatoes peels have tiny nubs on them called eyes, it's from these eyes that new plants vegetative emerge. The plumule usually appears first if there are no soil available and will continue to grow and form a stem and the first leaves. Add some soil and the radical appears fast and grows into a healthy adventitious root system. A tip to a great potatoe harvest at the end of the season is to keep the stem covered at all times with well rotted manure. |
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