lavande et vanille

noob gardening: a peasant with a smart garden

[lavandevanille]

surviving life through copious amounts of lavender tea and spiced mocha. vanilla is my drug of choice. I do some other art things while I chronicle my journey with my first smart garden here and hope I don't kill any plants along the way.

[lavandevanille]

May 22nd

My twin flowers are... ? Reaching for the stars? 🤭 I don't know why the petals are suddenly standing upright. Google doesn't seem to have an answer and PictureThis deems it healthy so I'm not gonna worry. Just curious and quite amused! I'll be deadheading these four blossoms in a couple days for tea, since I'm bringing them over to my sister's for a couple weeks anyway and I don't wanna shock them too much. There are plenty of new buds forming already, so I'll have new blooms soon enough!

My creeping woodsorrel meanwhile is very happily growing in its tiny makeshift home 🤭 It's still too babie to properly transplant into its own pot but considering how fast it grows I hope this is enough for the next two weeks. We shall see!

[lavandevanille]

May 21st

Not quite a gardening update. Properly harvested my lemon balm for the first time today! Took a couple sprigs of spearmint as well and now I have delicious lemony-spearminty tea to sip on all day as I work on an art piece 🥰🥰

[lavandevanille]

May 18th

We have baby blooms! 🌼🌼

First twin buds on my calendula have been slowly opening up over the past couple days. It's past 8pm right now. I'm thinking they might fully bloom by morning and I'm so excited!! They're already so pretty like this 🥰🥰✨

Meanwhile, my creeping woodsorrel sprouted up its second leaf stem which might also fully open tomorrow! It still excites me whenever I think about how I spotted this growing out of my outdoor calendula pot.

I've been looking at possible choices to buy as houseplants next month and I did have an oxalis in my list. I mean sure I was looking at the red triangular oxalis, but the heart shaped leaves on this one is just.. well it's going straight to my heart and winning it over 🥰🥰

[lavandevanille]

May 15th

Soon!!! 🌼🌼🥰💕✨

[lavandevanille]

May 13th

Quick update!

Brought in the creeping woodsorrel that sprouted up yesterday as a weed in my outdoor calendula pot. Placing it on my SG3 in a tiny makeshift container for now until it's big enough to properly pot up and flourish on its own as a pretty houseplant 🥰

What are weeds I don't know that word. 😊

[lavandevanille]

May 12th

Good morning beauties 🥰

My sister brought her basil and apple mint home! It's been a very eventful 2-3 months growing them up from seed, and we've enjoyed a few harvests from them. They're all grown up now and hopefully will be unproblematic for her in their forever home.

With the extra space and my new bag of soil coming in, I finally got around to repotting my basil into bigger, separate pots, as well as transplant all four of my mints from the SG3 units into self-watering pots outdoors.

Spent two hours doing all that yesterday - got done an hour before sunset and hoped the lack of sunlight right after transplanting wouldn't shock the mints too much. Fortunately they are looking very happy this morning and are settling into their new environment well! I'll still keep a close eye on them for the next week, just in case. 🥰

My outdoor calendula pot sprouted a weed. PictureThis tells me it's creeping woodsorrel. I'm not gonna get rid of it - might repot it and keep it indoors as a houseplant. It looks pretty so yay free plant! 🥰✨

My little oasis indoors is now quite barren. 🥲 I decided not to click in new pods aside from the calendula a week ago. I'll be staying over at my sister's for a couple weeks later this month due to some scheduled renovation works, so I figure it'll be better to wait until I return next month to plant some new babies. (I've got my eye on painted nettle and polka dot plant~)

Besides, one of the plant cups developed a weird red stain and I don't understand how or why that happened. One of the wicks also had roots and weird black mold growing inside them that I couldn't pull out or wash off. So I tossed both. I'll get new ones next month when I'm back home.

[lavandevanille]

May 10th

Spending my days now anxiously, eagerly and very impatiently anticipating my first calendula blooms. 🌼

[lavandevanille]

May 7th

Deep sigh.

So last chilli pepper post I made, it was two of my chilli plants blooming their first flowers. I had three full blooms at one go, it was super exciting!

And I tried my best to self-pollinate all three. Within 24 hours, like clockwork, the flower petals began to wilt, so I thought I succeeded in pollinating all three.

This morning when I checked in, one of the flowers had completely fallen off, stalk and all. Sad. The other two had fully shed their petals, and I could see the very tiny beginnings of fruiting happening. I figured, 2 out of three is great odds and was very pleased with myself.

Then, I decided to repot my chillies into bigger pots. 🥲 When I was finally done and wanted to take the after pics, I could only find one stalk 🥲 I honestly have no idea if the other one somehow fell off before I started repotting or during it, but it's gone. And now I am sad. 🥲🥲

Yeah yeah I shouldn't have done the repotting now etc etc but at the time I kinda didn't have a choice. My basils are starting to get choked and need to be moved into bigger pots, but in order to do that, I first need to free up space which meant I had to repot my chillies.

But silly me, forgot that I'm running out of potting mix and a new bag is only coming in next week and I only remembered all of this after I'd finished. So my basils are still cramping up and waiting to be repotted. All in all not a very good brain day for me. 🙃

Gonna spend the next few weeks in intense mother hen mode over my one (1) baby pep, I guess.

[lavandevanille]

May 4th

Hellooooo 🥰 It's been a while since I updated about my inside plant babies~

I made a huge harvest of my apple mints yesterday. They grow so lush so fast!! Not being able to properly prune them for a couple weeks (because of covid and subsequently being insanely busy) resulted in them growing all the way up to the grow lights. Like actually touching them all Jack's beanstalk-ey.

So now I have a huge bunch of apple mints in my fridge and I still had my harvest from a couple weeks back. So I decided to use some of the older ones for yummy yummy apple mint tea! With a hint of vanilla essence to bring out the taste and mmm it tastes so good~ 🥰🥰

The rest of my mints are doing wonderfully! They're all very slow growers at first but once each seedling had a couple pairs of decent sized leaves, they started growing a lil faster! I've been able to pinch off the tops of each mint, and I even have harvested a few pairs of large (larger than the ones pictured) lemon balm leaves!

They all smell so so so good and whenever the breeze picks up, my room immediately gets refreshed with an amazing mix of minty scents 🥰🥰🥰 I can't wait for next month when I can finally get my hands on a pot of eau de cologne mints to make my room smell even lovelier!

My calendula plant is finally starting to put out a few flower buds! I think the biggest one at the top might even be twin buds! 🥰 It's 58 days since I clicked the pod into the SG3 - and if I'm not wrong, it sprouted about a week or so later.

Speaking of calendula. The hyssop plant I had in my SG3 was starting to dry up really badly the same way the outdoors one did. So before it completely died, I harvested the entire thing. Managed to get a decent amount of leaves to save in the fridge, so at least it wasn't a complete fail. I clicked in a new calendula pod, because it seems to grow pretty well. The calendula I have outdoors is growing idk 5x slower than this one indoors, but it's growing and it's happy, so I figure it wouldn't hurt to end up with a nice big pot full of calendula plants outside 🥰

And here are some cuttings I'm currently rooting!

That one jar has basically half of my first (and second? I don't remember) apple mint harvest from a couple weeks or so back. They were pretty slow to take root, but I'm not in any rush, so they're actually just in time. 🥰

I've already given my sister five basil cuttings that had rooted very nicely and they're happily thriving in their shared pot right now 😊 These basil cuttings are newer... I think about a week? A week and some days? I will very likely be finally repotting all my basils tomorrow. Maybe all my mints too... or just the apple mints. Not too sure yet. But definitely the basils!

I also stuck a rosemary stem in. I'd bought some the other day and usually I get a small pack with a couple of young stalk. This time however, they'd given me a thick, older, woody stem. 🥲 I tried my best to get rid of the completely wooden ends so the stem does have green in it but I'm not at all sure if it'll take root. 🙃

[lavandevanille]

May 3rd

THE FIRST CHILLI FLOWERS BLOOMED TODAY!!!

Oh my god the excitement smsndjdj I have literally never grown a plant from seed long enough and successfully enough for it to flower!! Even when I was in gardening club back in school, all we did was tend to the school's gardens once a week. Sure I gained a lot of experience in how to care for different types of plants but we never did any actual planting, so just getting this far now and all on my own is simply mind blowing 🤯🤯🤯🤯🥳

I'll try self-pollinate them in an hour when they're at their peak!

[lavandevanille]

April 26th - Budding Chilli Buddies

MY CHILLI PLANTS ARE FLOWERING!!!

Okay no that's clickbaity 🤭

Both of my mystery chilli pepper #1 plants are putting out their first tiny lil flower buds all over and I mean ALL OVER. The upside down baby bells are everywhere and it's such a beautiful surprise for me to wake up to! 🥰

If I'm not mistaken, #1 came from seeds of the spicier variety (but still less than bird's eye, I'm sure about that much at least), so I'm very excited to see what kind of flowers/pepps it actually is!

And don't worry, I removed the leaves with the fungal/bacterial thingy going on after I snapped those pics. So curious.

I also finally repotted my outdoor calendula into a bigger pot. Slightly worried here. Calendula is also another finicky plant that likes having its soil drying out in between watering. But I only have self-watering pots right now, so I'm gonna keep a close eye on it.

The outdoor hyssop pod completely died. The entire thing just. Dried up and died. It still had half its water left in the outer pot so it isn't neglect on that. I'm also having the same wilting issues with the hyssop pod in my SG3 indoors where it's significantly cooler, so... I don't know. Might be a faulty batch where the nutrients are wonky? 🤷‍♀️

I will be quite busy the rest of this week so probably going no updates again. But next week I am planning on moving my apple mints from my SG3 and place it outdoors where it can thrive and take over the world. I'm also repotting my own basils as well into a bigger container so they can properly flourish.

Big plans next week bye! 💕

[lavandevanille]

April 26th - A Basil Saga

It's been a while! This past week and a half has been a daze of being busy and being reinfected with covid, neither of which are fun 🥲 But being fully vaccinated made it significantly less crazy this time around. 😊

Anyway! Gosh so much has happened in this past week and a half. My sister's basils, which I had repotted into a self-watering pot a couple weeks back, was starting to show heavy signs of stress. You can see the beginnings of it in the previous post on April 18th. The lower leaves were turning a sad pale yellow and just falling off, and it was just generally looking very traumatised.

Google told me basils don't enjoy self-watering pots, which really confused me considering my basils came from Click and Grow, which is basically a self-watering irrigation system with grow lights attached, and they flourish in those units just fine. So I tried adding some of the organic kelp fertiliser I've been using for my chillies. It worked... to an extent. The lower leaves still continued to pale and fall off, but the rest of the plants did perk up and grow more lush.

So next I trimmed off the roots that had grown way past the inner pot. It helped just a little bit. Poor thing was still quite stressed. Eventually I decided okay, maybe google was right. I emptied the water and kept the outer pot dry, only watering top down for a few days.

And wow it worked! The basils finally stopped dropping sad yellow leaves! I'd tested covid positive right after I first emptied the water chamber, so it was kind of a bittersweet relief knowing they were recovering along with me 🥲

Yesterday I was finally covid free and feeling well enough to garden for a bit, so I asked my dad to help drill a few holes at the bottom of the outer pot. I did a final repotting of my sister's basils right into the outer pot itself and also added in a couple more cuttings that had rooted out nicely while I was sick. Today it's looking extremely happy and bouncing right back to its fabulous bougie self!

Whew! 😊

[lavandevanille]

April 18th

Basil cutting potting day pt. 1!

It's been about 5? ish days since I first placed some basil cuttings in water to propagate. I'd gotten five cuttings in total. My sister is coming over to finally bring her basil and apple mint plant babies home today, so I checked on the basil cuttings to see if I could plant any into her pot.

Three of the cuttings had grown baby roots just long enough to be planted without them going through too much transplant shock 🥰

They're pretty short - in hindsight I really should've made the cuttings longer lol but they'll do! They planted up nicely, and there are also three babie seedlings coming up, so my sister's definitely gonna have a very bushy pot of basil she can continuously harvest~ 🥰🥰

[lavandevanille]

April 16th

It's apple mint harvest day!

Or rather, I just wanted to prune my indoor apple mints so they grow nice and bushy, really. And since some stalks are tall enough, I went snippy snip, stripped the lower leaves for tea and stuck the cuttings in water to root.

So I'm gonna get bushier apple mints plus some extra plants in a week or two, and my strawberry hibiscus tea is now happily steeping with some fresh apple mint leaves for instant gratification. It's a win-win-win! 🥰🥰🥰

[lavandevanille]

April 13th

Short update today and I do mean it this time 🤭

Took a few cuttings off my tallest basil stems - mostly the ones that weren't harvested a week ago - so they can grow nice and bushy~ Now they're in a covered cup of water to propagate along with my one lil hyssop cutting. 🌱

Hoping the basils take root fast. The plan is to plant half of them into my sister's basil pot so she can have more to harvest from, because there's only one pod in hers while mine has two and are already more than twice as abundant.

[lavandevanille]

April 12th

APRIL 4TH TODAY

A short update today. It's been about a week since I last harvested my basils and they've already grown taller and very very bushy! A couple days ago I thought ah, they might be ready for a second harvesting this weekend. It's only Wednesday. They might be huge by weekend 🥰

I think I'll try propagate a couple stalks when I harvest this weekend. The thought of having endless basils is so very exciting! 🥰✨

A few hours later...

I lied, today isn't a short update 🤭

I had some energy that I've been really lacking past few days, so I decided to finally repot all my chilli plants!

I actually thought I could just uproot the four larger ones and leave the tiny bird's eye seedlings to continue growing in the plastic container. But I'd waited too long. All the roots were entangled together, so I had no choice but to transplant everything~ I think I ended up accidentally killing a couple of bird's eye seedlings but I still have five good ones, so I'm really not complaining.

They're all a lil droopy and exhausted from the move, but I'm sure they'll all perk right up to how they were by this time tomorrow! 🥰

My lil spot in our outdoor garden is looking really lush and bountiful now 💕

Hopefully, in about 3-4 weeks, I can move a couple more of my insider mint pods outdoors. Maybe even repot the calendula. Poor baby is truly struggling to grow outdoors but its indoors sister is already so huge and majestic.

Even more hours later~

The tallest hyssop plant was starting to fall sideways from being so tall. 🥲 So I went ahead and snipped off a lil cutting and stuck it in a lil cup of water (covered, of course, because again I despise mosquitoes).

I had to pinch off the lowest set of leaves, and it really is only a pinch but I steeped it with some dried lavender buds for a... well it wasn't tea, it was more of lavender infused water really. 🤭 Couldn't smell or taste the hyssop, but it's making me all the more excited for when I can finally harvest more leaves for a proper cup of hyssop tea 🥰