I had the pleasure of chatting to the lovely Sam and Julia on Newstalk ZB this morning and one of the things we talked about was things that can be growing things from the kitchen when you don’t have ‘proper’ gardening supplies. For example:
- Take an avocado stone and suspend it over a jar of water with toothpicks to get it to sprout
- Try growing Coriander seeds from your spice rack.
- Spring onions are fun – keep the bottom 2- 3cm of your spring onion bunch and sit them upright in a jar of water (just a little bit of water) and it will regrow at a rate of about 1cm a day!
- Pop a potato in a bucket of dirt and treat like a house plant – because it really doesn’t like the cold and frost will kill it and in less than 100 days you’ll have a spud harvest.
- You could get bored kids to grow fruit pips. Although they could turn into a large tree over time and may not necessarily give you the exactly the same variety of fruit you started with.
- You can also try growing garlic from about now on out in the garden – just plant the cloves separately about 5cm deep and 10 cm apart.
- Ginger is another fun one to try – look for a fresh nobbily bit on the side that will become a new bud. Google this one for more info.
- A carrot top is a good one for kids, but it won’t sprout a new carrot but will bloom and give you seeds to grow hundreds of carrots
Nothing need get in the way of a keen gardener’s desire to grow things!
I may have also shared my desperate pursuit of an Easter Hot Cross Bun. If you missed that story you can find it >HERE<. It is quite a topical topic as many stores are bereft of standard baking supplies. Check out how I made flour and yeast!
Come again soon – stay home and stay safe this Easter.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
The two problems with growing avocados from seed is that there is now way of knowing what the fruit will be like until it actually develops . . . a few years later, and seedling trees must go through their juvenile phase before maturing enough to bloom and fruit. Juvenile growth is very tall and vigorous, so mature growth may be very high off the ground if the tree is not brutally pruned down. (Grafted trees are grafted from adult growth of known cultivars.) Fortunately, I have never met a seed grown tree that failed to impress.
I think at this point it is more for something to do rather than the end result. Having said that avocado trees have been in short supply over recent seasons and become very popular and as a result very expensive, so someone may decided to get into grafting them. But for now it is really just a way to pass the time in the middle of a lock down. : o)
That is how us kids grew ours. We did not care if they ever made avocados. Of course, all of them did, and all of the avocado are good!