The Avocado Chronicles: September Edition

It’s the September edition, so why am I posting this on the 1st October? Well, because I’m a lazy, procrastinating bum. That’s the actual, genuine reason. I have no excuse, I’ve just been lazy and addicted to YouTube videos again. Time for another entertainment ban for myself I think.

Anyways, shortly after I posted the August Edition, I planted AvoWCA:

It was really interesting to see close ups of the inside of the avocado seed growing. I didn’t want to leave its broken root growing in water for too long so into a little pot it went. With this, AvoTMN upgraded to its own ramekin because I moved the ginger shoot to AvoWCA‘s old one. Then guess who showed up?

That’s right: AvoIDontHaveSpaceForYou (AvoIDHSFY) and AvoGonnaStartAnAvoFarmIGuess (AGSAAFIG). Obviously, since AGSAAFIG is now the youngest, he gets to share with lil ol’ ginger shoot.

Read More

The Avocado Chronicles: August Edition

It is often said that parents are so excited by their first child and so scared to do anything wrong that they dedicate much time and energy to documenting the child’s growth and making sure they’re doing well. However, by the time the 2nd, 4th… 5th… 7th then 8th child comes along, you kinda just give up and let the kids do their thing.

Of course, I’m talking about plant-babies and not real ones *ehhem*. But yes I’m not quite sure how to continue documenting my avocado plants’ growth anymore. The first 4 were super exciting; I cared for them, I babied them, I loved them (for the most part).

But now I’ve stopped updating the post because they’re growing up too fast and there are just too darn many of them at the same time. I guess I’ll do a major update here then. Since we last checked on my avocado plants…

Avo1 has grown out of its pot, been re-planted outside and has grown a lot. I didn’t even realise its roots had grown so much until I turned it over and saw root spilling out the bottom. I’m glad I checked.

Read More

Growing Celery Take 2: Fail

This post was last updated and completed on 7/22/2020.

After take 1 failed massively, we tried again with a couple of new celery stalks. I realise now that I probably should have planted my trial 1 on 22nd May when it’d already started to grow roots but the stalk hadn’t yet begun to mould. You live and you learn.

We bought two more stalks of celery and after eating most of one we decided to try again. This was the organic celery from Trader Joe’s. So far it seems to be a lot more successful. Check back for updates!

12th June

I thought the toothpicks in the celery may have been causing it to rot so this time I tried to tie it up with string instead:

Jacky asked why we couldn’t just put the celery into the glass with water at the bottom? I thought I read that it would cause the celery to rot, so to confirm this I did some more research and watched a video about growing celery (probs should have done that first). The video advised to cut a little off the bottom of the celery before putting it in water, and that it needn’t be suspended by toothpicks.

Jacky also said that since the celery just grows from the middle anyway, can we just put the thus-far uneaten centre of our celery stalk into water and see how it goes?

Sure, why not. Let’s test it:

We’ll call them Shortie and Tall Bro. I’ll let you figure out which is which.

I also trimmed a little off the bottom of the Tall Bro. Presumably doing this removes the hardened layer from the bottom so that the celery can better absorb the water and its nutrients.

Read More

Horticulture: Growing Avocado – Huge Surprise!

This post was last updated on 7/6/2020. To find the next instalment of my Avo plant growth, please click here.

Following on from my trying to grow everything post, I wanted to do an update on the avocado pip I attempted to germinate. Spoiler alert: it failed.

However, the most surprising thing happened. When we went to Trader Joe’s two weeks ago, we’d bought a bunch of fruit and put them in our new fruits basket. (That’s not the groundbreaking revelation. I know, fruit in a fruit basket, imagine.) We put bananas on the bottom rack and the avocados in the middle. As the bananas ripened, we noticed the avocados ripening at a fast rate, and when Jacky went to cut open one of the avocados 5 days later, he noticed that the seed had germinated and started to root inside the avocado.

He reported to me after that he thought he’d accidentally cut off the root when cutting open the avocado. I didn’t take photos of it, but I figured that even if the root had been cut off maybe it can re-grow, so I shoved the seed into some soil, watered it and left it outside. We’ll name it Avo1.

A day later, suspecting that it could happen again, I carefully cut open a new avocado to reveal…

Read More

Growing Celery From Stalk Take 1: Fail

A month ago I also tried to grow celery from a stalk cutting. We bought the celery from Trader Joe’s. I’d done quite a bit of research online and it sounded simple enough.

I took off the very outer layer because the celery would have otherwise been to large to fit into my cute little tub (this, I later learned, was probably mistake #1), stuffed toothpicks in the celery and ensured the water level always covered the bottom but barely. For about a week it looked like nothing was happening.

Then, on the 14th May the centre started poking its head out, and by 15th May it’d grown even more:

Read More