gejala pokok | symptomatic trees

We are spreading the love…we are spreading broccoli love…

It started yesterday,

And it’s here to stay,

We are spreading the love… we are spreading broccoli love…

******

OK..OK..it all started a few weeks back when I was in my ‘woo-hoo spring is here!!’ mood…and crying out to the world ‘let’s grow vegetables, so we can have healthy organic vegs’…la..la..la…

So, I sowed an entire packet of Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli seed coz I thought, so what, maybe not all will live…and what do you know - a few weeks later…nearly all of the tiny seeds actually grew into little seedlings! so, now I must have more than 200 baby broccoli plants, looking for nice happy homes to live in!!

So, this is my devious plan. I am going to spread the veg love. I’m planting LOADS in my back garden and I am also giving LOADS away to friends and family, so they too can start to love and care for plants like we do.  It’s broccoli for world peace, baby!

Imagine what the world would be like if …if…if…there’s broccoli everywhere!!! Simply broccolicious baby!!

Broccoli…it’s a revolution. 

*peace*

no pictures for this post ’cause i left my camera somewhere else. but thought i should jot down what’s been happening anyway, garden log style

1. sunflower seedlings
tried to revive them by taking them away from the scorching sun on the balcony into the studio under florescent lights. then made chamomile tea as an natural fungicide and poured them on all 4 pots.

also had a brain fart idea that they might be under-nourished so tried putting a diluted transplanting fertilizer solution on one of the pots (schultz starter plus — which i am sure is actually not meant for seedlings and i am an idiot). all i did was accelerated the dying process (DO NOT DO IT!).

took a couple back out to a shady spot on the balcony. nothing worked. they all just died. at different rates. the cotyledons yellowed, shrank and dried up, followed by the first pair of true leaves.

the only one that’s still kinda surviving is the one i placed under a florescent lamp, 24 hours a day. and i think all i’m doing is just slowing down its impending death. so i am letting it out to the balcony today, to enjoy some real sun, and finally letting go. *sob* *sob*

on a brighter note, i now know a little more about natural fungicides and pesticides. going to try a new batch soon. and going to take some of heathrjoy’s and ecrane3’s good advice, and hope, hope, hope for the best!

2. transplanting the petunia
decided to transplant the petunias on sunday cause they were flopping over one by one. not having good garden vibes last week. not sure what the problem was, but think it is probably a mixture of over-crowding and lack of proper soil (used a horti ’soil-less’ seed starting mix). don’t think it’s damping off, because the stems look alright, but i might be wrong.

they’re the tiniest little things and a real bugger to transplant. not possible to dig underneath with a fork, ’cause the fork is just waaaaay to big. so i resorted to using my fingers and pinching them as lightly as possible near the leaves to tease them out of the soil.

wish i had a picture to show you, but maybe another day. it’s a real nightmare, and i think i killed as many as i managed to transplant. they’re now in small metal pots, with more space between them. just had a check on them, and a majority of them seem to be fine. going to keep fingers, toes and knees crossed!

3. sundew is on the way!
turned out i was having a dyslexic moment, and took down the wrong number despite checking 3 times. david from petpitcher rang back, and we’re going to collect the little plant and byblis seeds today. yay! can’t wait

meanwhile, i have a tray of wheat grass on the go for my mom. a little late for mother’s day, but hope it turns out fine. don’t think i did the pre-sprouting preparation for enough times, but the tray has been a seedling charm. wish me luck!

i’ve been reluctant to transplant the celosia since i read in various places that they don’t handle transplanting very well. but since it was my second attempt at growing from seeds, i messed up quite a fair bit.

instead of mixing the peat moss with the soil, i put about 2 inches of peat moss on top of the soil. which means that the seedlings are probably not getting enough nutrients after germination. it took forever to grow true leaves — more than 3 weeks after germination. germination also took quite long (well, longer than the statice, which took only one day — celosia took about 3 days or so).

i bought some transplant starter-fertilizer thing, and misted some on after the leaves started to look a little yellow. BIG MISTAKE. made is worse, and after some advice from naturemitch in garden web forum, i left it alone and thinned one pot. it was alright for a bit, but now it’s getting overcrowded again.

since naturemitch said he’s transplanted celosias without having them die suddenly, i thought, why the hell not, just give it a go. by this point, i’ve transplanted the sage, phlox and balsam okay (even though not all of them are surviving, but a majority are fine), so feeling a little less clunky.

mixed the usual soil with a little bit of peat moss and a little bit of vermiculite, put them in a flower box because i haven’t got the small cell things, and i am hoping that they’d just be happy in the flower box until they all grow up and make weird blooms. watered from top — flower box doesn’t allow for bottom watering — as gently as i could with a ‘rose’ spout watering can. plonked them under florescent light, near a fan for 2 days.

they looked okay as of last night (day 2):

a couple didn’t survive… and i think i saw a spider hanging out near it. hope it’s the good kind, and not the kind that’ll just eat them all up.

geez, with the slowly dying sunflowers and dead statice, i’m starting to think i’m not cut out for this. maybe i should give myself some timelines to quit, so i won’t be responsible for bringing more things into life just to die. *gleep*

but on a brighter note, finally saw some full-grown cockscomb of the ‘coral floral’ variety at a nursery on tuesday. it looks pretty damn strange! can’t wait for my little babies to grow and start blooming

pulled these off the internet. it’s fluffier than the one i saw, but still wicked. like a cross between brains and corals and something entirely wonderful

After worrying like crazy over the floppy sunflower seedlings, I took some good advice from heathrjoy & ecrane3 from dave’s garden forum, and from mscratch at the gardenweb forum and decided to bite the bullet, and transplant them.

I was really nervous, ’cause the last transplanting experiment I did totally failed. But decided that if I didn’t do anything now, they’d just get worse. So here’s a inch-by-inch account of this second attempt:

1. Did a web search on transplanting sunflowers specifically and found these:
   • What seedlings really want - some basic information about growing seedlings.
   • Found this cool video on how to prick out seedlings.
   • Repot at your own risk - *gleep*!
   • Transplanting sunflowers - pretty handy and quite detailed. The advice was based on the assumption that I’d be transplanting from a germination site to the garden. Since the only ‘garden’ we have is a balcony, I can only transplant from small pot to bigger pot. but I reckon the information should still stand, except the only wild animal I have to worry about is the cat!

   

   Who, me?
   

2. Bought soil (organic hummus mix), new pots, and a packet of new seeds in case this fails terribly.
3. Washed the pots with soap and water. Set up the mat and mixed the soil with a little bit of peat moss and some vermiculite in a bucket. Loosened them with a small garden fork thing, then added them into the pots, close to the top. I did have a sieve, but wasn’t sure how to use it *blush*, so I just used my hands until i found a big, fat earthworm in the soil! After that, it was the fork and gloves for me…

   

4. Next is the scary thing. Trying to get the seedlings out from the original pots without killing them, and repotting it. First I used a chopstick, but the soil was not really budging. Then i tried with a small plastic spoon as a spatula, and thought I felt some roots breaking (!). Finally, resorted to my hands, and gently eased them up in clumps.Instead of trying to loosen the soil from the roots like I did the last time, I potted them with the clump of soil together. And there were a couple that were very close together and I didn’t think I could separate them without doing some serious damage. So I just potted them together. These were easier to handle than the statice because it was just so much bigger and the root system was already quite advanced! Quite amazing really… considering they’re just short of one week old.

   

5. Then I dug a deep hole (with fingers again), and with the help of mukaketupat, eased them in and added soil around the root clump and the stem. I planted them a lot deeper than they were in the original pots, but not quite to the top ’cause the new pots are not tall enough. Watered them really generously from top and bottom. Wasn’t sure if I should stake them at this point, so I tried one.Ten seedlings (and one whole hour) later, this is how they look:

   
   Still kinda floppy, but can you believe it, it’s much better than before!

6. The only florescent lights we had was in the toilet, so I plonked the pots on top of a step ladder so that they can be as close to the light as possible. Left them there the whole night with lots of prayers…And this morning:

   
   They’re actually starting to get straighter!

   
   This is the one I tried to stake with a chopstick. It was totally keeled over before, but now it’s looking quite good.

So I think I’m pretty happy Will move them out to the balcony tomorrow for some proper sunlight. Hopefully they’ll keep getting stronger and stronger, and then I might start thinking about transplanting the other ones!

Yay!

i haven’t updated in awhile because nothing much has been happening.

last saturday, there was one of those freaky super crazy rainstorm. not only was george totally submerged in rainwater (forgot to drill holes under the window box), but my statice seedlings were also almost totally smashed up. i was going to propagate them on sunday, cause ‘true’ leaves was starting to sprout (inside blue circle below). but looking at their battered state, i thought it was best to hang on for awhile.

last night, i just couldn’t take it anymore. they looked so bad i just had to do something about it. the soil has turned soggy grey, they refused to stand up, so i thought, fuck it, just try. checked out this site which has really detailed instructions. and i swear, i followed it all to the minutest detail.

first of all, when i gently dug under the roots with a disposable yogurt spoon, i think i severed some of the roots. when i picked them by their leaves, some of them just broke in my fingers. when i gently dropped the clump of seedlings on the gardening mat, nothing happened. the soil didn’t break off, and i am still left with a soggy clump.

i tried my best. planted some of them that didn’t look like they were already dead. and today, most of them look like they are dead or dying. it’s very very very very very heartbreaking. i hate transplanting. NO MORE!!

on another note. spent saturday with mukaketupat & a best buddy who’s mad about plants shopping for ‘implements’. after discovering the horror of the thunderstorm, and doing some attempts at rescue missions to george and the seedlings, we planted.

we shared some of our seeds, and she planted sage, marjoram, curled parsley and balsam, while i planted the balsam, petunia, marjoram and sage. and the marjoram sprouted yesterday! the petunia is trying hard to today, and i can see some teeny tiny green spots, same with the balsam. though there might be some mold happening because of the dampness in the past few days. no no no no no no no…..

i think they might have come from the failed phlox & cosmos experiment i tried sometime last week. too big a bowl i think. dammit, need to do research.

• when to thin seedlings (for celosia later, and i’ve asked questions at dave’s garden also, but mukaketupat is taking the piss out of me =|)