Gardening

[Rose White]

Luxurious! @Mach123

 

[Rose White]

Doing space station gardening with LED lights in my little apartment. The idea is to grow herbs and greens and experiment with flower seeds.

 

[Friday]

Doing space station gardening with LED lights in my little apartment. The idea is to grow herbs and greens and experiment with flower seeds.
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LMAO… I’ve done the same thing with orange(high pressure sodium) and then white (water cooled halide)… but I’ve. Never. Done. PURPLE. OMFG The purple is breaking my brain! It’s. PURPLE!!!

This is awesome.

 

[Defaultxlove]

Love love love @Rose White!

 

[Rose White]

Thank you @Friday and @Defaultxlove !

The red and blue are the colors on the light spectrum that plants are hungry for! Green wavelengths are basically trash to plants. These led’s are amazing and the leaves are dark green. They are growing in coconut fiber and perlite and get all their nutrients in their water, so it’s kind of like hydroponic, but not with the continuous flow.

 

[Mach123]

Night Shade, moon flowers or Jimson weed these sprouted from those seeds I got on the beach. My friends wife recognized the seed pods and asked could I get her some. I looked but they were stripped from the beach by the flood tide. She said they mightn’t make it through the winter so I’m taking some inside here and bringing her some down the cape. They’re her favorite.

 

[Rose White]

True they don’t do well in winter, but they can develop a thick root that can potentially sprout back in spring. I have two datura currently.

The little one is less than a year old and the big one is about 5-years-old. My neighbor became enchanted with it and helped me prop it up with strings and bricks. It’s on the north side of the building so it doesn’t get as much sun as it likes and grows leggy and falls on itself so we sort of suspended it to give it air and also let us sweep under it.

The tomato worms aka hawk moths and their cousins LOVE datura and datura love them. Even if the caterpillars eat all the leaves (like they did to mine) it will come back.

One more thing—you can make a pain-relieving salve from the leaves. Very good for muscle sprains, arthritis, migraines, any inflammatory stuff. A bit of a process but you might like it—and the stuff is kind of miraculous—soothes on a deeper level than icy hot.

Welcome to the world of datura :). You should check out some of the cultivars—astounding what some people have managed to pull out of the genetics!

 

[DharmaGirl]

Hi, all, I've been away but I'm returning. I bought a greenhouse! It's in the process of being built so I'll have a picture hopefully by next week. It's high rated for winds and snow, and we get both! I can't wait to start. I'm also preparing the soil ( putting chicken poop on it ) to expand my veggie garden. There are so many people here that need help that I give away veggies and eggs to those who need them so I want to have more for next year.

I want to try the datura. My whole body is full of arthritis now so I need something that will help.

 

[Rose White]

Update on the space plants! (Calling them that because an article about growing plants on the space station with these red and blue led lights is what inspired me to do it inside my apartment.)

I turned off the lights to take this picture so you could see how green they are!

Left to right you have: spinach, (behind that is an unknown green I think collards), baby marjoram, unknown green again (poss collards), big marjoram after its first haircut this morning, cilantro, and spinach.

Here you see kid marjoram, Thai basil, and mustard greens.

So all the seeds (with the exception of the basil and cilantro) were really old! And the only ones that sprouted for me were the marjoram, spinach, and packet of mixed salad greens. All those seed pots you see have nothing in them but I’m thinking about experimenting with the packets of bad seeds by just pouring like 50 in one little pot and seeing what happens.

One time my ex husband was lazy and poured handfuls of a variety of chili seeds into the garden and didn’t thin them and it was so interesting to watch the progression of who survived. The survivors ended up living about five years with good strong trunks. You know what was interesting about those chilis? That when they cross pollinated the hybrid phenotype showed up right away on the fruit. He had planted jalapeños and some other kind that is thin and dry and they crossed and made some interesting results! We had so many chilis I still am eating them five years after moving out of that house. I’ll take a picture to show you how beautiful they are.

You can see how some are smooth-ish—those are the ones I called “chili seco” or dry chili, and the ones that are real wrinkly had more moisture in them when they dried, so they have more jalapeño genes. The jalapeño wrinkly ones grind more into a powder and the smooth dry ones make more flakes. They are all sort of medium heat.

I miss growing chilis and miss having a garden but I know I have no time and besides I do live my little space station garden! Been eating the greens and cilantro. Haven’t eaten the marjoram yet but it smells so sweet and pretty—I love it just for who it is.

Been thinking about getting a bunch of different cannas for the back patio because they grow so well back there in the shade and are very hardy. But at the same time I like variety so not sure.

 

[Mach123]

A tale of 2 poinsettias. The red one is new this year the green one is last years and it spent the summer in the front garden. It’s recovering from being transplanted .

 

[Mach123]

Here’s the fly trap I was so worried about in its winter home. Doing wonderful so I was worried for nothing. We looked up how to care for it and it said don’t worry about feeding it because they become mostly dormant in winter. Such a great pet.

 

[Rose White]

Am letting go of my space garden. Is hard to maintain proper levels of nutrients. Also thrips destroying chlorophyll. Also fungus gnats new house pets.