A couple of months ago I bought some seed envelopes from Dollar Tree as I do every year. 3 didn’t deliver so I had to get rid of them and now I have 4 growing but I don’t know what is happening! They are supposed to be either daisies or coneflowers and yet all I am getting are small blooms that look like the pepper plant blooms!! Only 1 plant (first picture on top left) seems to have a different leaf and no blooms!
Adding to that my pepper plants are now giving more than one pepper per plant!! Are the peppers taking over my apartment? Will I be turning green? (HERMIT!!! HELP!!!)
I am waiting to see what happens with all the plants by the end of this month. Meanwhile, I can still rely on my 15-year-old Cuban plant to give me a few blossoms every day!
Pick any month, week or day of the year and my Geraniums, Begonias and/or misnamed Christmas Cactus are in bloom! I look for the reasons and I really don’t have an answer. It is not the sun and the window they are in because some are in the east, a few in the north and a load in the south.
I thought it might be the temperature in the apartment which would explain, maybe, the Christmas Cactus blooming all year round as I do keep it cool–though some may call it cold! Still that doesn’t explain the blooming Geraniums and Begonias or the yellow blooms of the Cuban plant. It might explain the green peppers growing as they need temperatures between 60 & 90 greens, though it is never 90 degrees inside my apartment yet it could be the sun shining through.
The only problem I have are getting Poinsettias to bloom after they lose their red leaves (‘blossoms’). Every December I buy two of them and though they last all year they never get red bracts again but I will try again this year.
Meanwhile I will just enjoy the blooms I see every day inside my apartment! (If you look you will see a new pepper forming on the plant in the first picture.)
Over 10 decades ago I got a Christmas cactus in December that bloomed every year a week or two before Christmas. Then in 2008 it all of sudden bloomed for my Leap Year in February!! After that it seemed to bloom for all and any holidays from Christmas to Halloween, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Thanksgiving and, yes, in February!!
For a year or two it only bloomed once or twice a year and then in 2016 it once again bloomed two weeks before February 29th!
Since then there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason but it blooms at least 6 months out of the year. Last week when I was watering the plants and got to the ‘Christmas’ cactus I noticed buds and now there is a bloom with many more to come as there are buds all over the plant!
I don’t care when you come into my apartment–it can be any day, week, month or the past 10-11 years the same 6 plants have buds and/or blooms on them and not always the same colors. They can be pink, white, red, burgundy, orange or fuchsia and not always in the same pot!!
I love watching them go from a bud to a full bloom.
Over the years I have grown Romaine lettuce, peppers and all kinds of vegetables. In some instances, say like I was cutting a tomato, I would just take a few seeds and without thought would just push them into the earth in a flower pot and forget it. That’s what I did with some seeds at the beginning of January and today I have a full grown plant. I will just have to put them in their own pot, put a stake in, put it on the sill of my east window where they will get full sun and just wait for the flowers to come and then wait for the tomatoes!!
Over the years I have had plants of all sorts having luck with some and not with others. I, also, tried planting various fruits and veggies from seeds, nuts and the vegetable itself.
I have had success with avocados, Romaine lettuce, sweet potatoes, etc. I don’t know how many times I have planted seeds from peppers but most times nothing happened. This past summer I took some seeds from a few green and red peppers I was cooking with and though a few stems showed up here and there but it wasn’t until last month that flowers started to bloom. Nothing came of them and they were soon dropping off.
A week to ten days ago there were about 8 blossoms and I didn’t want to see them also die so I made a decision. I very seldom give any plants away but Luiz had just done new landscaping around his home so I decided to give them to him to plant in the ground and see if WE could get any peppers from them. (All I want is one!)
I don’t know when I fell in love with flowers and plants but I do remember as a youngster going to Miami Beach with my family and being in awe of all the wild Bird of Paradise plants and multi-colored flowers. There was also our summer home in New Jersey and I can still smell the peonies in front of the house.
I think, though, that I really got involved with all of it when Johnny and I lived together in Memphis. We had hanging plants all over the townhouse and he was constantly working in the backyard patio garden. I found myself bringing home plants.
It was when I moved to Gateway, here in Fort Lauderdale, that I really went all out after seeing how many residents made their own gardens outside of their ground floor apartments. I started buying all sorts of plants putting many outside on my walkway. Indoors I not only bought plants I would grow heads of lettuce, stalks of Romaine lettuce, green peppers or I would also break off a stick off the Hibiscus bush outside, stick it in a pot and watch it grow, put out buds and flower.
When we got new owners we also got new rules and no longer do you see any flowering bushes, trees, resident’s gardens or plants out on my walkway.
I do have 28 plants in my apartment from Geraniums to Begonias, Cuban plants, Aloe and Christmas cactus, a miniature pine tree and I just ‘buried’ some tomato seeds in a pot.
Nothing, yes nothing, makes me feel better than seeing flowers in bloom and if you ever want to get me to do something bring me flowers or a plant!
I don’t care what the calendar says because as far as I am concerned it is SPRING!! This happens to me every year–I walk into the Dollar Tree in January and there are the displays of planters, bags of soil and hundreds and hundreds of seed packets selling 4 for a Dollar! I approach the rack telling myself I will only get 4 and I won‘t get vegetables because of the disaster the last year and the first thing I pick up are a packet of radish seeds BUT it does say ’good for container growing’! And then a few here and a few there and before I know it I have 16 packets of seeds!!
Between the last post and this I think you have a pretty good idea that I love to grow things!
It’s not Spring yet BUT…
On January 1 I saw I had an extra sweet potato in the fridge and I decided it has been awhile that I have grown a sweet potato vine that I would. It is so easy makes a beautiful window sill plant.
For those who haven’t done it before all you have to do is stick 3 toothpicks around the upper half and put it in a glass of water and the toothpicks will keep that upper half dry. Within a couple of days you will see roots growing under the water. I usually wait for 5-6 long roots before I transfer it into a pot with dirt.
It isn’t long–maybe 2-3 days–and the green leaves will start growing. Within a week I had 5 vines growing and they will soon start ‘draping’ the window.
The plant is the first thing I see when walking into the kitchen and the first thing I do is see what directions the vines are going and how many there are.
