This posting is about "my" little garden.
There is a small area behind the house. My grandma was visiting my house because we moved, and she took charge to transform the land into fertile vegetable garden. She basically took care of everything. Now that she has gone back, I water them, sort and organize them, pull out weeds, talk and sing to them. It is quite fun work.
At the beginning, since the quality of the soil was so bad, we had to add a lot of fertilized soil. After pouring and mixing soil, we kind of sectioned the area to plant different vegetables.
We only planted seeds. No baby plants were used. We bought lettuce, tomato, bell pepper, broccoli, sweet basil and perilla(a leaf of perilla, which is kind of another species of sesame plant whose leaves are edible vegetable). We planted those seeds. Well, more like we "sprinkled" them. No one thought that all those seeds would actually sprout and grow, I guess.
My grandma loves mango, so we had a box of mango from Costco. I thought, 'oh well why not?'So the mango seeds were saved to be planted. The melon seeds from the melon fruit were saved, as well.
It has been about a month since the seeds were planted. Here are some pictures of the garden now.
The lettuce section. Since we simply "sprinkled" the seeds instead of sowing them individually, it is quite crowded. We already plucked and ate some of the bigger leaves and they were delicious. :]
The basil. I planted them in this pot that says, 'Basil' on its side. Apparently I put too many seeds so I had to transplant some of them. It is still a bit crowded though.....
These are the ones I transplanted.
Tomatoes! They have grown so much in a month!! They already flowered and producing nice, round tomatoes!!!
This is the perilla plant. They are also crowded. I need to separate and plant them in a nicely organized way. In case you do not know what these are, perilla leaves are used mostly in Asian foods. One example is that you use these leaves, along with lettuce, to wrap the Korean Barbeque. Mmm.... Hungry.....
This is the huge lane of melon plant. They grew so big and started to invade other plant sections. I had to guide them towards the back because they started grabbing onto neighboring plants with their vines.
The Melon started producing the fruit. They grow very quickly. If you see a fruit growing, you should trim the budding flowers to direct the nutrition toward producing a nice sweet fruit.
This is a big one. :]
Look who is hiding behind the leaves~ Oh, and as you can see, I trimmed the stem on the left side because a lot of flower buds were starting to grow.
As you can see, all those small round things will grow to be a fruit. I can't wait to see all those melons.
This one is the mango. I was a bit surprised when they emerged, because planting the mango seed was kind of an experiment/joke. But they are all healthy and growing "Lightning-McQueen-fast." :]
The aerial view of the baby mango trees.
I planted more mango seeds in a pot. I mean, we ate a whole box of mangoes. They are doing very well and I am proud of them.
I started growing avocados as well, from the seed. I planted them but it will take a very long time for them to come out of their hard shell. One of the avocado seeds are being germinated in water, as I have seen in many YouTube videos. No progress yet, but I will post how it is doing when something happens.
Anyways, it is really fun watering them every evening and observing them growing. It is kind of exciting when you realize they have grown or started producing fruits.
Besides these vegetable and fruit plants, I do have some flowering plants. I recently sow Aubrieta seeds in a beautiful flower-shaped pot. My peace lily and orchids are a bit sad because I have been putting so much effort into vegetables and fruits. I gave my mini rose, which I got as a gift a while ago, some rose plant food today, hoping it would have enough energy to make flower buds again.
Hm... I actually didn't realize that I had so much plants in my care.....
Regardless, with some time for watering and lots of love, I hope these plants grow to be healthy and gorgeous.
"No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,
and no culture comparable to that of the garden."
-Thomas Jefferson
