Garlic - day 9

Today is day 9 of planting 3 garlic cloves. I have been keeping them at 60 degrees. I had read there needs to be a dormancy period to force them to sprout, but they did not get the memo. All 3 cloves have started sprouting!

Day 9 (December 27, 2012)

I went away for a few days for Christmas. I returned to the herbs falling over. The rosemary is trying to reach the window for more sun, so I guess it is doing well. I need to move it closer to the window...if the cat will allow it. But the parsley and basil are just keeling over. I am making sure they are kept watered and misted, but I just don't know....As long as they last until Monday, I'll be able to use them for homemade spaghetti sauce.

The water the celery root end was in had turned murky, so I changed the water. Big mistake, I guess, because the whole celery root end fell apart. I wonder if it just doesn't like artificial heat. The one I did last spring did better for longer.

The garlic, though...I have kept it at 60 degrees. Despite what I found online that garlic needs to be kept at 40 degrees for 2 months in order for it to sprout, I have one shoot starting. It has been just a few days. Exciting!

Day 3

So much for my control group. I opened the egg carton, and all the tomato halves had white fuzz growing on them. And they were a breeding ground for fruit flies. I swear those things reproduce in a matter of hours, but they probably had a head start in the shriveling tomatoes before I even started working with them (such a cheerful thought).

So the egg carton tomatoes are in the trash. Outside.

The soup container tomatoes are growing white fuzz, too, but the container is an effective fruit fly trap. The soup container is one of those single-serve containers with holes in the lid so you can microwave the soup right in the container. I'm keeping these tomatoes around awhile, since they are killing the fruit flies - or, more accurately, the tomatoes are attracting the fruit flies and the container is trapping the fruit flies, which are then drowning in the water I put into the container. This works just as well as putting vinegar into a jar with holes in the top.

The tomatoes in the soil? I'm still waiting...I probably won't see any results until the new year. Patience....

And this isn't something I grew, but something I made: My very first extracts are ready for use! There are lots of instructions online about making extracts, but basically, you put some of whatever you want to extract into a jar, you add a clear alcohol, such as vodka, and you let it set for 4 weeks or longer. My first extracts are vanilla (use the beans), orange (use the rind), and almonds (use raw almonds). I have visions of growing my own mint and peppermint and making my own extracts from the leaves. If I am successful, I'll have peppermint extract to use for Christmas baking next year. As we say here in New England, extracts are wicked easy to make.

Day 2 – An Experiment

Someone on Facebook suggested instead of keeping my tomato halves in an egg carton, I should go ahead and put them into soil. One problem: I didn’t have soil – except the pots I never threw away from trying to grow herbs last spring. (What? Don’t you know at least one person who never throws anything out?)

So, okay, this morning, I took some of the not-too-old, dried out soil and put it into a plastic take-out tub from Chinese Hot and Sour Soup (hey, I do reuse a lot of the stuff I hoard…and besides, the container was only from last Sunday) and loosened it up and remoistened it from the tap. Then I put the soil back into the container. I did this with only three of the tomato halves. A good experiment means you have a control and one or more test groups (I took about a million research classes, whether I wanted to or not, so I might as well use them), so I put four more tomato halves into a single-serve soup container with holes on top (another reused object) and covered them with water. I left the remaining five halves in the egg carton, misted them with water, and closed the lid.

I also took three garlic cloves and put them into a third pot of reworked soil to see if they will grow. A little more research suggested I should put this pot into the fridge for at least 2 months to force the garlic to grow, assuming the garlic hasn't been treated to prevent sprouting.

My Kitchen Table Garden
It gets some sunlight!

Today's gardening

I bought parsley, basil, and rosemary. Already grown, in pots. All I have to do is keep the plants alive long enough to use them. How hard can that be? Very hard, if the past is any indication of the future. But I'm optimistic. Maybe, at the very least, I can get some fresh spaghetti sauce out of them before the New Year.

And I bought more celery and put the root end into a cup of water. We'll see what happens....

Day 0

In The Beginning....

I don't have a green thumb. I can keep cats alive for a long time, but plants? Not so much. If plants could follow me around, screaming at me to feed them, maybe - just maybe - they'd have half a chance.

Instead, I have a Burnt Umber thumb. (A what? you may ask. It's my favorite Crayola Crayon color name. And it's a shade of brown. A Brown Thumb. That's what I have. But doesn't Burnt Umber sound so much...classier?)

If you are looking for a how-to-garden blog, this isn't it. This is more of a "don't do what I do" blog - or a "learn from my mistakes" blog.

I saw somewhere on Facebook (or someplace online) where some cheapskate (and I'm all about cheap!) put the root end of celery into water and it grew more celery. Get celery without buying (or stealing!) it? I'm there...

It got this far before the stalk got soft and flopped over. I will try it again (with a new root end) and put it into soil sooner. I can do this. I can.

So yesterday, I had some Campari tomatoes that were getting a little wrinkled. They still looked okay otherwise, and I didn't want to throw them away. I cut them into quarters to fry them with garlic and herbs in olive oil for a quick and simple pasta sauce. The first three tomatoes looked all right on the inside. The fourth? There were these little white things I thought were worms. Ick! I tossed the tomato away. The next tomato had the same thing. I looked more closely - was that green on the end of the white thing? Omigosh - the tomatoes were sprouting inside the tomatoes!

A quick check on Google told me that this isn't all that unusual, especially with tomatoes that have been left, forgotten, on a counter. So my next experiment will be to see if I can grow my own crop of Campari tomatoes.

I cut the remaining three tomatoes in half and put them into an empty egg carton (I love that I can recycle the egg carton!).

And now I wait....