Ann's Air Gardens

More on the Anasazi Beans

Scarcely more than a month ago, this is what the plants we got from sprouting a couple anasazi beans looked like:
Yes, they are leggy from not enough sun and other neglect, but still they are vining up from the window ledge to the roof of our porch and have their first two flowers:

That was on November 23.
A week later, here are some little beans:
Detail:   These are most fascinating to watch, particularly since they are at eye-level right at the entry to our porch.  It is just amazing to see them growing in water, with nothing but some recycled nutrients discarded from our indoor plants, and of course, a few grow rocks to anchor the roots and stems. 

Since this is working I decided to sprout a few more beans and grow them indoors in the AeroGarden Deluxe where they will be given lots of light and optimal care.  Since the Anasazis turned out to be pole beans, I germinated more kidney beans instead, as the cooking beans I grew turned out to have the bush habit and additionally, they run a few days earlier.  Here is a kidney bean plant next to the Anasazis outdoors on our porch:
Those 25 cent plastic food containers are just the right size, and I have them in a refrigerator ice cube bin.  The covers make excellent "blue mulch."  Like the other plants in this experiment, our kidney beans seedlings are leggy, but they do already have a dozen or so tender young beans showing. 

Petunia Experiment

We found a six-pack of bedraggled petunias at our local garden shop and decided to see if we could rescue them:

 

Five are shown above, and I put the sixth plant in one of my containers with the grow rocks.   I also took cuttings and put four of them in a Gel2Grow cube and two more in water, just to see if they would root.   Someone told me you cannot root petunias in plain water, so I had to try it, but I did dip one of the cuttings in a bit of Schultz.   I should have taken the advice reader Red Icculus gave after my earlier post and tried the polyacrylamide crystals, but we had one of the cubes lying around and had not gotten around to buying the crystals.  

This next gadget is a gravity feed water filter that uses two Doulton "candles" which can be scrubbed clean and reused indefinitely.  It filters out 99.9% of all the ickies and ensures our success in indoor gardening without the bother and expense of hauling in water.  We don't drink the tap water where we live so we certainly are not going to feed it to our plants.

We have had this unit for about ten years and really just bought it for emergency preparedness, but when we started doing some serious indoor gardening, I dragged it out and put it to use.

More on the petunias here  and here and here.

A week later, on Thanksgiving Day, here are my orphan petunias:

And here on December 2:

 

The little one in the center that has no flowers yet is a newly rooted cutting, with a tiny bud on it ;-) 

These are taking OVER!

Red Tomato Showing Color

This is still the first and only fruit on this plant, but look at all the new buds.  I was curious to know if growing fennel near the tomato plant would actually interfere with its development, and apparently it did.  Either that or it was an odd coincidence that this one plant turned out to be a bit of a runt whereas the control plants flourished.   Here is an interesting chart that shows which plants are good neighbors for each other and which are not:

Tips and Techniques from Garden Guides.com

The first photo emphasizes the new buds below the fruit.  Even so it is plain to see that in a day or two this one will be red:
     

The second photo, taken one day later, shows more red.

We ate it November 21, along with out first jalepeno pepper:

Now you can see it truly is a tiny cherry tomato!

Our other plant has several clusters now, and is still budding:

When I pruned this one, it branched out and started blossoming again, but this time I saved the cuttings and rooted them in a glass of water alongside the AeroGarden.  Now a plant that grew from one of the cuttings has its own pretty yellow flowers.  It lives in  one of the containers I made out of nested juice bottles, filled with Hydroton rocks and liquid nutrient solution:
The white thing sticking up and out is a handle made from a pipe cleaner.  This makes it easier to pull the middle container out for draining and testing the fill level.  Since this is an elementary  manual ebb and flow system, I lift the inner container which has drain holes in the bottom up out of the middle container once or twice a day to flush the solution over the rocks.  The outer container is just there to reduce the amount of light shining on the solution.  It could be more decorative, but I haven't gotten around to that phase of the experiment yet. 

Since the plant just started budding, I am still using a 2:2:2 ratio of the General Hydroponics Flora Series liquid nutrients, but will change to 1:2:3 (grow:micro:bloom) the next time it needs topping off. 

More plant companion information:

North Dakota State University Extension

Just for Tomatoes!

More goldens on the way: 

I Just Love to Grow Roots

The growth on this tomato (left) was evident four days after I put the stem in plain water out on the porch.

To the right is another tomato cutting.  It is

Dirt gardeners we've known love to snap off a twig of something, stick it back in the soil and wait for nature to make a new plant.  We used to do that ourselves back when we had dirt. 

Now we live in upstairs condos in a sleepy desert town where the "commons" are lush with palm trees, Spanish Dagger, Mexican Bird of paradise, Cat Claw, and Bougainvillea.

We do most of our own gardening indoors, however, or on an enclosed porch.

For the kinds of cuttings that do not readily root just from popping them into a glass of water, we find Gel2Root, shown above, a great convenience.    All you have to do is poke a hole in the foil cover,  push the stem through, put it in bright, but indirect light and wait.  Soon you will see the roots right through the translucent container, which, incidentally is reusable. 

When I was a young whippersnapper, sharing cuttings was just a way of life, but now I am finding that more and more people are completely unaware that one can easily "clone" many plants just by cutting a 3 or 4 inch stem off, snipping several of the bottom leaves, and putting the pruned stem in a glass of water on the window sill.  I used filtered water because the plants don't like chlorine. 

No need to get technical, but for the curious, the place where the stem of a leaf meets the stem of a plant is called a node, and you want a stem with several nodes if you want it to root.   After cutting the bottom leaves off, leaving a little bit of each leaf stem on to prevent the node from getting soggy, just put it in a glass  enough water in it to cover the pruned node.   I usually put three or for cuttings in each glass.  They seem to like company. 

When taking cuttings, it is best to take them in the morning, and to select healthy stems without any buds or flowers. 

Some plants (such as tomatoes, basil, or mint) will root in about four days and need nothing more than plain water.  Others appreciate a little rooting hormone, such as Schultz's Root Tone which can be found at almost any hardware store or garden shop, or the more expensive rooting gels such as Olivia's, Clonex, or EZ-Clone, available from hydroponics dealers.

When the roots are well developed, the new plant is ready to be moved into a hydroponic planter (or put out in the garden if you have one or in a pot of dirt if that is your choice.) 

I prefer passive ebb and flow containers that I make out of recycled household products, like the Tide laundry soap container I blogged about in connection with our pepper plant.  I fill them with hydroton grow rocks and feed them General Hydroponics Flora series nutrients.    I'm not trying to win prizes for the most perfect plant, so I don't worry too much about getting the exact right formula.  I inject the concentrated nutes directly into our AeroGarden bowls using a syringe.   More on that soon.   But for my ebb and flow containers I premix the nutes, using 1, 2, or 3 ml of concentrate, depending on the stage of growth.    When flowering plants such as the tomatoes and peppers are just starting to bud, I inject 2 ml of each of the Flora series nutrients into a clean 2 Liter soda bottle, half full of filtered water, shaking it a bit to mix after each injection, since we do not want the nutrients to mix with each other in their concentrated form because that could lock out some of the minerals and spoil the solution. 

The same "formula" works for new plants, too, but for those I fill the planters half way and top off with plain water.  Seedlings need very little food, so those I fill a quarter of the way up and top off with water. 

When the plants are well-established, but have not begun to bud, I use 3 ml of the Gro, 2 ml of the Micro, and 1 ml of the Bloom.  When they are in full bloom and fruiting I use just the opposite:  1 ml Gro, 2 ml Micro, and 3 ml Bloom. 

   

These pictures, taken today, show several plants coming off what GH calls the "Transition to Bloom phase" and going into the "Blooming and Ripening phase."

News on our Cucumber Experiment!

I ended my post Future Pickles? with a question and happily now have the answer:

This photo shows the first female bud from my experimental cucumber and it proves that my experiment is working. 

I delayed the female blooms for a month because I wanted to determine whether the day length sensitivity, if compromised, would prevent the plant from fruiting.  Apparently not. 

    Please compare this overlay of a detail taken from the photo shown above with the original photo.

The boy flowers start out as little ovals on the end of a slender stem:

  The girl flowers, even before they open, have a second oval atop the stem but below what will soon be a blossom.

Thus, the above photo is proof that even if we get the cucumber seedlings off to a good start by allowing them to remain in the nurturing environment of an AeroGarden, when taken out they will still perform in a passive hydroponic planter.   

This is very good to know in our climate, because that means I can start the cucumbers indoors a few weeks before the weather normally cools down, and then by manipulating the lighting,  time them to go outside days or even weeks later in case it gets too hot again.  

I came close to killing a couple of pepper plants because after waiting until we though the worst of the summer heat was over, I put them out and slept late the next morning.  By the time I got out to check on them they were about goners.  

The fact that female buds are in evidence also answers a question going around in some circles as to whether or not it is possible to grow cucumbers in an AeroGarden.

Again, the issue is that cucumbers are day-length sensitive and if they get more than eleven hours of direct light a day, this suppresses the plant's ability to produce female flowers.   To test this theory, I kept a cucumber plant near the grow-lamps on our AeroGardens after the male flowers started opening.  The grow-lamps are programmed to stay on for 18 hours and off for 6 hours.

For a whole month the plant kept producing male flowers, but not one female flower. 

Then I started moving the plant away from the grow-lamps for part of each day.  Within just a few days, this same plant began producing female buds.  Although these have not opened yet, there is no doubt about their gender, and the sketches above overlay photos I took of both the girl and boy flowers to show their gender differentiation.

When the girl flowers show, I'd rather just put the cucumbers out for the bees to pollinate, because they are early risers and I am not.   As they are heat-loving plants, that shouldn't be too much of a problem, but some of our hot spells here in the desert might even cook a cucumber.

So far, this one is doing OK outdoors:

 

These are still in the Aerogarden:

For some reason the link to Johnny's Seeds where I bought the seeds for these miniature white cucumbers did not work in my response to Ginger's comment below so I will try again here:

Miniature White Cucumbers 

Can't manage a link for the white Pearl variety that she grew, but here is a source for the seeds, which Park doesn't actually sell at present:

Source for the Pearl Variety

NOTE:  If you are transplanting the cukes into dirt instead of a hydroponic planter, of course, it is better to remove them from the AeroGarden before the roots mature to the point where they have adapted to living in a liquid nutrient solution.

Beans with Verdolagas

A while back, cooks were cautioned never to make beans in the pressure cooker, but times have changed and technology has changed with them.

Good eating hasn't.  It used to be a lot harder to make this meal, but no longer. 

Step one:

I put a cup of clean pinto beans in the bowl of the multicooker along with enough water to fill the bowl half full and set the timer for ten minutes.  This is my substitute for soaking the beans overnight.

Step Two:

A while later, after the pressure has dropped, I open the cooker and add a chunk of meat.  Pork loin or shoulder is fine, or if you like the beans vegetarian, just leave the meat out. 

Step Three

Next, stir and add more water if needed, so that all of the beans are covered.  Then cook another 30 minutes and when the pressure comes down the second time add chopped fresh purslane (also known as verdolagas) as shown:

Then cook for an additional 10 minutes.  When the pressure comes down again, these are ready to eat.  Additional seasonings may now be added or the beans can be enjoyed as is. 

Here is what the purslane looked when it was still in the salad bar:

When it is still small like this we eat it raw in salads, but as the plant gets larger, and it does get very big, I cut it completely back and after saving a handful of cuttings to root to make new plants, cut it up to cook.  Until recently the search engines turned up very little about purslane and less about verdolagas, but recently recipes and even photos of the plant have started to appear. 

If you are interested in growing this plant, I recommend starting with the Golden Purslane seeds.  I have seen recipes that say you should wash the purslane and cut off and discard the red stems, but when you grow your own indoors this is not necessary.  The stems are quite delicious cooked up in beans as long as you slice them first, as shown my photo above. 

Finally, yes, purslane is the same "weed" that is invasive in gardens everywhere and often seen forcing its way up through the cracks in a dry sidewalk, and if you have some in your garden that is free from insecticides and other hazards, it can be eaten, too, but it is not nearly as tasty as the domesticated varieties that are now available, from which I have grown single leaves up to 3" long and an inch wide: 

NOTE:  To see another recipe and photos of the salad greens I grew to make it, look here:  Bitter Greens from my Garden.          

I also planted a few of the dry beans we had on hand, pintos, anasazi, and others and put them in hydroponic planters on our porch.

This and That

Here are the first tiny buds on our post heat-wave tomato clone neglect-lings:

    This is a vine (read "indeterminate") type tomato grown from seed bought mainly for my root-from-cuttings experiments, but I had a little altercation with the neighbor's dog while re-potting them and got the labels mixed up.  I won't know which kind they are until they bear fruit.  

UPDATE November 15:  OK, I think that is going to be a Red Currant Tomato.  When I peered into those hollow looking "buds" I was sure nothing would come of them, but here they are now:

The kidney bean got its first flower today too:

This is just a reminder that the Hydroton grow rocks need to be rinsed before using:

I use the planting containers to rinse the rocks--same method as when growing in them.  It takes quite a bit of sloshing to get all the clay dust off.  Even after three rinses, look at that mucky water:

   Here is the packaging:   

You may recognize the Worm's Way logo on the shipping box!  I have placed three orders with them so far and have been delighted each time.   Wherever you buy them, I recommend the Hydroton brand rocks. 

We have a really nice family-run pet store down the block and when they did not have Hydroton rocks, I tried the brand they were able to supply.  I give the pet shop an A+ but the Hydro-Balls brand did not turn out to be very useful.  They might be great for reptiles, but not for my plants!

People often ask which size Hydroton rocks to buy, and my answer would be both.  Personally, I sort my grow rocks into 4 sizes, and save the smallest ones for tiny seedlings indoors.  The large ones work well in the bottom of containers where I mix them with a few river rocks to cut costs, then I put a broad layer of the medium-large sized ones over that and fill in to the top with the medium small.

If you have to order online, the small diameter rocks are listed as 4-8 ml and the large ones are 8-16.  I should have put a ruler next to the rocks up above to give you an idea of the size, but here is something better:

iRuler 

iRuler.net calculates the size of your display and shows you a ruler marked off in inches and millimeters.  When you buy the large hydroton rocks, the biggest ones in the bag are a little over half an inch in diameter and the smallest ones are closer to a quarter of an inch. 

We Ate It

This is our first ripe yellow cherry tomato grown from the AeroGarden kit.  Other tomatoes are growing and there are still lots of buds, but we ate this one today:

OK, it was tiny, but absolutely delicious!