Friday, February 25, 2011

You know you're a plantaholic when ...

You know you're a plantaholic when you are germinating seeds right next to your bed. I give you the Dirt Gently Nursery for Slightly Fungus-ridden Toilet Paper Rolls:


Yes, this is the flat of toilet paper rolls that I had moved out of my propagation station and onto the top of my fridge due to an incipient fungus invasion. (Edit: I moved the flat to my bedroom because it turns out that the top of my fridge isn't quite warm enough to keep the flat at 20°C, mostly due to the fact that the kitchen and adjoining living room are unheated overnight. Overnight temperatures in that part of the apartment drop down to 8°C. On the other hand, keeping my relatively small bedroom 24/7 at a reasonable germination temperature is far more economical. So no, I did not move the seed flat into my bedroom because I'm crazy :D )

After treating with a sprinkling of cinnamon and watering with chamomile tea, the white fluffy stuff seems to have stopped growing, and some of the seed has even germinated quite vigorously:


The bok choy is going gangbusters, and I can see the moonflower (Ipomoea alba) sprouts unfurling and breaking the surface of the growing medium.

I was always under the impression that monocots had a single seed leaf due to their having only a single cotyledon, and dicots, two. But, the bok choy seems to have four distinct leaves. That's a bit weird ... can someone explain to me what's going on here? Are the four leaves in the picture above actually true leaves, or simply pairs of bilobed seed leaves?

2 comments:

  1. I love this pictures, its true... you know when your addicted to plants when.. Alas it's a beautiful disease! :) I'm always happy to meet fellow plant enthusiasts.

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