Ann's Air Gardens

Please Do Eat the Campanula

I bought this perennial at Trader Joe's:

If it looks good enough to eat, go ahead and have some.  The Bellflower blossoms and leaves are both edible. 

This one is called Campanula Get Mee, and I'll have to admit that it got me.  The species is portenschlagiana and it beats me why we don't see more of these plants for sale on the sites that wire flowers as gifts. 

I've had it less than a week, but so far it is holding up beautifully, and being a perennial, I should be able to root cuttings in an AeroGarden mini and have lots more after this one conks out. 

I'll try it and if it works, I'll post the results on my Bellflower Page: 

Blissful Bellflowers

The Million Bells rooted; this should too. 

SOMETHING ELSE:  Red Icculus, who comments below, writes a fine blog which recently contained the following interesting statement: 

"If the pH goes up, she’s thirsty.  If the pH goes down, she’s hungry."  For the rest of the story, go here:  A Great Hydroponic Tip

Verbenaceae

Just when I fall in love with a plant, it usually turns out to be on somebody's list of invasive species, ie, hated weeds.   OK, so it is prickly and tends to get out of control, but down here in the desert, there aren't too many prolific bloomers that can make it on their own, and surely I have mentioned before that I am decidedly NOT a dirt gardener.  So now that I've moved to a place where we have a little patch of soil, I needed something that can grow on its own. 

Lantana would seem to fit the bill, and after doing some exhaustive research online and deciding that Lantana would be perfect, I did what I probably should have done in the first place and took a walk around the neighborhood to see what everybody else was growing.  Sure enough...red and orange and blue and yellow ones doing great all over the place.   I didn't waste any time asking permission to take cuttings to root, and so my first Lantana experiment is underway:

  Most people whose comments I have read suggest taking stem cuttings from the woodier part of the branches, but there are several reasons why I prefer to try this first since I'm wanting to get some plants established indoors in water before transferring them to the dirt outside and I want to see how fast I can root them in an AeroGarden.  Typically the softer cuttings at the tip of the plant root faster, so we'll see if this is an exception.

I made a bouquet out of the flower heads that I had to trim off, as cuttings root best when the plant can devote itself to growing instead of blooming:

As time goes on, I will add photos to my Lantana page:  HERE

A New Use for Milk Jugs

Having grown up on a dairy farm, I am pretty fussy about my milk.  Where we are currently staying the stores do not carry cream-top milk in the glass bottles, but they do have a 99 Cents Only Store, which sells milk that I consider delicious for under a dollar a quart.  So, being frugal, I was naturally looking at those cute plastic containers and wondering what they might be good for.

Then I got this idea: 

I'm growing scallions, basil, and this tomato cutting in the converted milk bottles, and wrote articles about the latter two here:

Cloning a Tomato Plant

Basil in a Milk Jug

As described in the basil article, I cut the top off the jugs and inverted them in the base, with the cap screwed on and drain holes punched beneath the handle.  This works just as well as the containers I was making out of Figi water and Juice bottles, but the milk jug containers, although shallower, have a larger diameter.