Ann's Air Gardens

A Little Scare: What if We Ran Out of Amaranth Seeds?

Sure we can keep rooting the stuff from cuttings, but even if it were legal to transport plants across state lines, they would never survive our four-day trip across the desert in August.

So when, for a short time we were unable to get Tender Green Amaranth from Evergreen Seed Company, I had to bite the bullet and figure out how to grow and gather my own seeds.
  

Like purslane, which is another of my favorites, amaranth can act rather weedy if it gets loose outdoors.  So I had been happy to just keep buying the inexpensive seed packets from Evergreen.

In a pinch, though, I might have to harvest my own seeds.   Well, it turned out to be a whole lot easier than anticipated.  As it turned out, these fuzzy  little clusters each contain enough fully developed seeds already to plant a whole new crop.  If you look really hard you can see them peeking out from the clusters in this photo:

  Apparently they don't need any special treatment, either.  I popped a few into a grow sponge and "planted" them in the AeroGarden Deluxe two days ago, and they are starting to germinate already. 

The stalk shown here yielded a harvest of about 50 shiny black seeds:

Also coming...The tender young leaves are delicious in salad, and the older ones can be cooked in a vaiety of ways, but are the amaranth stalks as tasty as asparagus?  I will try them and let you know. 

Meantime, here is a nice recipe for amaranth soup:

Soup

Before seeing The Soup Queen's recipe, I decided to try inventing my own.  Like Mayakirana, I cut the amaranth leaves into strips, using tender green instead of the red variety, and floated the strips in chicken broth, along with thinly sliced scallion rings.  Adding a handful of precooked diced potatoes, I heated the broth until the greens softened a bit, but they retained their lovely bright color. It was beyond delicious.

Today I made a different version:

This one is pretty much "kitchen sink" soup, that is I put a little bit of everything we had on hand in it.  Starting with a can of Progresso chicken vegetable rotini, I added a cup of left over pork stock, a handful of corn, a whole bunch of scallions (saving the roots to plant for my next experiment!), some dried- beef gelatin crystals, a couple of potatoes, and, yes, a plateful of our AeroGrown Tender Green Amaranth sliced into ribbons.  We served it with turkey and cheese sandwiches made from the small round whole wheat rolls, and a salad of baby romaine, beets, and blue cheese dressing. 

The Asian Red Amaranth is not as tender as the green, but cooks up nicely, and is good in skillet dishes such as potatoes, eggs, and sausage.  The very young leaves are tasty in salads where they also add an appealing bit of color. 

   

Asia Red Amaranth  in the AeroGarden         Red and Green on the Porch, ready to Bolt

(with other young salad greens)              

Another Moss Rose

When we return to our desert home in August, the only small and inexpensive flowering plants available in local stores are impatiens, vincas, and moss roses!  Nothing else can stand the heat.

We saved a 2" moss rose cutting in a glass of water and kept cutting it back and rooting the segments until we got a fat little plant.  Every now and then it produces one or two flowers:

  

The flowers only last a day, but they are bright!

The petunias seem to like having them around, too.

We transferred the petunia seedlings from potting mix to the liquid nutrient solution on November 20 and they were in full bloom from Thanksgiving Day until past Christmas.  This is my first time growing them hydroponically, so we don't know how long this will keep up, but they have many buds at present.  Some of the branches that got too long rooted in water and are flowering, too.  

Next to basil, I am thinking that petunias are the easiest-to-grow plant we know. 

 UPDATE:  The moss roses have finally taken off.  We are now getting four or five new blossoms every day.  They are all red, as they come from just one small cutting that I saved to root, but I have a nice seed packet ready to try next fall when we return from our summer trip.

Portulaca plants take about 70 days to mature from seeds, and this one took about the same amount of time to start blooming after propogation by stem cuttings, but that is because I subjected it to quite a bit of neglect while it was sitting in water growing new plantlets.  I started with one really small stem and kept cutting it back and starting it over.  It was in a passive container for several months.  It does much better in the AeroGarden.  Apparently, both Portulaca and Purslane need a bit more aeration than some other plants we've tested.  

The leaves looks yummy, but do not taste near as good as our Golden Purslane.  They are said to be edible, but we don't eat them, although if they keep producing this much foliage I may try a handful in the next pot of beans.  The flowers are an inch across. 

Yes, Kidney Beans Grow from Cuttings

So do tomatillos!

I didn't know if you could do this or not, so I cut off a kidney bean stem about 3 inches long and stuck it in a glass of water.  A week later we had this:

Eventually I will make a chart of what roots from stem cuttings and what doesn't and how long everything takes.

  The online Grow'Em Plant Propagation Database notes that you can do this with Lima Beans, but Kidney Beans are not in their index. 

It is useful for me to know that plants which tend to outgrow the AeroGardens, such as beans, tomatoes, and tomatillos, can be pruned back and new plants started from the cuttings.  This gets new plants started somewhat faster than starting from seed, and also, if the seedlings get too leggy, sometimes the cuttings branch out and become more attractive plants. 

Raining All Day

In our desert paradise where the sun comes out almost every day, and the rain blusters and then usually goes away almost as fast as it came, this is unusual. 

It is the first "winter" that we have tried growing tomatoes on the porch and we are sort of waiting for an unexpected frost to come and wipe them all out, especially now that every plant has at least some visible little round green fruit.   Still today's 48 F (roughly 9 C) didn't have me too worried, until we went downstairs to empty the trash.  Whoa, it was colder down there.  I thought I had better look up the word "frost" just in case.

I'm not particularly math-challenged, in fact I like math sometimes, but why didn't somebody tell me this little trick before the internet came along and offered all those instant fahrenheit to celcius conversion programs?    Here is a link that explains a neat way to guesstimate in your own head:

Guesstimate Fahrenheit to Celcius

To summarize,  what they are saying is to subtract the Fahrenheit temperature at which water freezes (32 F) from the temperature you want to convert.  In my case that is 48 - 32 = 16 and divide by 2 = 8.  Then add one tenth of that to the 8 = 8.8 which I choose to round up to 9 C.  After all we are guesstimating. 

Given that most tomato plants do not set fruit when consistently exposed to temperatures below 50 F or above 90 F by day (70 F by night), it is expected that that production will fall off, but what about the little tomatoes hanging on our vines? 

Here is a fine article from the Ontario (Canada) Ministry of Agriculture that gives us an idea:

Effects of Extreme Temperatures 

I learned a new word:  Catfacing.  I guess our little babies are at risk for that, but at the moment they still have perfect complexions:

This is the first Red Currant Tomato baby!  If it doesn't make it, then next year we will try them indoors.  

NOTE:   Too much nitrogen can also prevent tomato plants from setting fruit. 

As Red as Rudolph's Nose

Just one day after I posted the photo of my chocolate brown pepper, it turned fire-engine red:

  Today we ate it.

Another peppery plant we are growing in water is Upland Cress.  When I wrote the following article about it, we had just bought a package of live watercress at the supermarket and I didn't take a picture because it was still in shock from the "transplant" but now it is looking good:

  Watercress

Everything in the middle is new growth.  I left a few of the original leaves on just for comparison.  They are sticking out on the right side.  It took a couple weeks for this clump of plants to regenerate. I did have to cut away wilted and dead stems a few at a time several times to make this photo-ready. 

I just rooted some new cuttings from our Nasturium officinale, too:

I started that one from a seed, though, in the AeroGarden, and these are recent cuttings, rooted in a glass of water just a few days ago and now potted in a 15 oz juice container with Hydroton rocks as the growing medium.  It prefers cooler weather and is out on the porch.  

I want to try the broadleaf cress next.  High Mowing Seeds, Cook's Garden and Johnny's all carry it now. 

Chocolate Pepper

This jalapeno grew from the AeroGrow seed kit and we left it on to see if it would turn red, but it turned this rich chocolately brown color instead. 

The insert shows a bud and open flowers.

We ate this one's big brother while still green, and it was delicious.  We were expecting this one to turn orange and then red, but we got a surprise.  Presumably, it will turn red before long. 

Smaller than a BB

This first tomato on our Tropic Boy porch experiment is now visible to the naked eye, although barely:

     

Three days ago and now.  It is hard to tell if it got any bigger.

If our Arizona winter remains mild, this will grow into a medium-sized red tomato.   The plant is too big to bring inside.

The base of the plant still fits in a quart food container, but the plant won't branch out.  It just keeps getting taller.

I have wound it around in circles at the bottom to keep it from bumping its head on the porch ceiling. 

It is still my little baby :-)

This plant now has four or five clusters of flowers, but they are all near the top of the plant, which, uncurled, stretches out about 8 feet in either direction.

To keep the sun off its roots, I put the planter inside a decorated paper bag from the dollar store.  You might think it needs a taller stake, but I am going to keep on wrapping the stem around in circles, which should shorter the stem a few feet for each revolution. 

Warm Again and the Tomatoes are Happy Outdoors

We had a few chilly nights and a couple of overcast days, a very rare occurance hereabouts, so I had to bring one of the pampered AeroGarden tomato plants back in for R & R.  The Tropic Boy and Red Currant varieties are doing great outdoors, however, and as now we are having warm weather again, at least in the high seventies, these guys are very happy.

This is the first open flower from the first cluster of buds that formed on our Red Currant Tomato experiment.  

 

These plants were started inside in an AeroGarden, but then moved to side containers where they got pretty leggy waiting for the summer heat to die down.  So I kept snipping the tops off and sticking them in glasses of water alongside to root, and just dumped the parent plants because there wasn't enough room indoors for all of them.

These are still growing in the quart containers and I've changed the GH Flora Series nutrient ratio from 2:2:2: to 1:2:3 (grow:micro:bloom) now that they are blooming. 

The Tropic Boy cuttings are doing great, too. 

   

There are several fruit on the Tropic Boy but they are still microscopic.  Now it is a race against time, to see if those fruit will mature before "winter" comes.  Our usual lows are in the mid 40's for December, January, and February, with highs around 65 degrees F.  This will not allow production of tomatoes of the highest nutritional value, but this experiment is just to see if the plants will live and bear fruit ripe fruit.