#buzzy seeds

[thesiouxzy]

Buzzy Seeds and Influenster sent Bushy a catmint plant. We’re excited to plant the seeds & watch it grow 🪴😺

[inthecityofgoodabode]

March 2023: Lavender

It has been a gray, rainy week & this is the only photo I have to show for it. I picked this up at a local Tuesday Morning. We’ve had miserable luck growing lavender so I thought how could this suck any worse? I’ll post as things progress... or not: 

[daviousjadious]

I have one of those buzzy strawberry growing kits, I'm gonna go plant strawberrys now -

[gardenscience]

Experiment 4 - Planting fireworks

Yesterday I posted about these new Buzzy Seed kits I acquired at Target for a dollar apiece. The really great thing about these kits is that even if they don't turn out, I get a full dollar's worth of enjoyment out of just planting the things. I am definitely going to keep checking in with Target every time there's a new holiday on the horizon.

The Daisy kit and Strawberry kit are both independence day themed, while the two herbs (cilantro and basil) are packaged in cool but un-themed mini greenhouses.

I photographed every piece of information that was included with the kits this time, just in case I need to know something about the seed batches later. The packaging is in a file folder, too, just in case. 

As always, each kit came with instructions, the proper amount of magically-expanding soil, and seed packets.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of watching these little dirt pellets grow.

Here are the daisy seeds... I think I probably planted too many.

I planted more than the recommended amount of strawberry seeds, too, but I did this intentionally so that I might maximize the potential of having one germinate.

Note: The directions on these kits say to sow the seeds and then press them lightly into the growing medium. In my experience, attempting to do this with small seeds is pretty much impossible. There is a much greater likelihood while using this method of having one stick to your finger than there is for getting it to do anything else. My recommendation is to not put quite all of the dirt into the pot, sow the seeds, and then cover them lightly with the extra.

The recommended press-into-soil method does work great for larger seeds, though, like these cilantro seeds. Did you know that cilantro had such large seeds? I did not.

After planting everything, I doodled some quick "art" onto the pots so that I could remember which was which. The greenhouses have doodles too, although they're much harder to see.

The two herbs are now getting to know their tomato neighbor.

The daisy, forget-me-not, and all of the strawberry kits are now roommates, too. 

Believe it or not, I managed to score one more growing kit during the time it took me to write this post... it should make a debut later today or tomorrow.

[gardenscience]

Experiment 4 makes some new friends

Today was the first day in more than a week that I didn't have to be at work. To celebrate, I hit up Target and Dollar Tree - two of my all-time favorite places. I did not leave empty-handed!

The Fourth of July is definitely one of my favorite holidays. I may even go so far as to say it is my ULTIMATE favorite. Dollar Tree was stocked to the roof with awesome red white and blue stuff, and Target had patriotic grow kits! I bought all four varieties they had for just buck each, which still seems like an incredible bargain to me. Honestly, I can't think of any other way I'd rather spend 100 cents than on an all-inclusive garden kit. Red white and blue shutter shades are a close second, though.

The kits are from Buzzy Seeds again, and it looks like I'll be growing strawberries (again), daisies, cilantro, and basil. The cilantro and basil came in cool little greenhouse-type things. July 4th may be a way off still, but when it gets here I plan to welcome it with homegrown herbs. 

There probably won't be an update posted about this tonight, but there will be something more in the very near future. In the meantime, I mentioned in my May Update that I had a gratuitous amount of photos on my hard drive that needed to be posted before their relevancy expired. This is still true, so Garden Science may be a bit more spammy than usual over the next couple of days as I try to play catch-up. 

[gardenscience]

Experiment 4 - Giant grow kit post

There are weeks during which I swear there is no interesting garden stuff to write about. Then, there are weeks when five things happen every day that should warrant their own posts, and I just don't have time for them all. This week has been the latter. 

I had been holding out for a nice day to finally bring out the grow kits again. In addition to my original strawberry and forget-me-not Valentine's Day kits (which I saved some seeds from in order to try an attempt #2), I acquired a second Valentine's Day strawberry kit, a Tomato grow kit from Dollar Tree, and a cactus-from-seed kit that my mom bought me in Arizona.

Since I already wrote about the planting of the two Valentine's Day kits in some detail, I will not go over them again in this post. Reference this post and just pretend that the events therein are happening simultaneously, if you want. 

I bought the tomato kit totally on a whim. It's a Buzzy Seeds kit just like the Valentine's Day ones, and I like Buzzy Seeds already because their packaging says "Guaranteed to Grow" on it. Heartening! For one buck, I already feel like I got my moneys' worth.

The seeds are for the "beefsteak" variety of tomato, which can potentially get huge. I have never tried to grow tomatoes from seed (usually we buy starts around here), so I'm making a bet with myself: If I manage to produce an unexpectedly gigantic Dollar Tree tomato from this kit, I am taking myself out to dinner to celebrate.

The magical growing dirt snake is one of my favorite things about these Buzzy brand kits. Maybe I'm easily amused, but I would almost pay a dollar JUST to watch those flat dirt pancakes grow into towers by adding water.

The new strawberry kit made a smaller but equally impressive dirt tower. The only bad thing about this dirt is that each pellet essentially becomes buoyant when watered. I will likely have to mist these things like crazy with a spray bottle until the plants take root so that I don't accidentally send the seeds on an H2O-fueled merry-go-round ever time I try to water them.

The cactus kit came with two sets of instructions - this delightfully simple one, and a much more complex one that I will scan at a later time. This is actually the second of these types of kits I have ever worked with. The first one actually produced a moderate number of small plants, but they remained tiny for years and then eventually died off. I am hoping that my luck will be better this time.

Here is the soil. I tried to mash some of those rocks down a little so that they weren't quite as obtrusive.

The seeds! The kit came with a ton considering the small size of the pot, so I sprinkled in only about a third of them and then saved the rest.

After moistening the soil and adding the seeds, I put everything back together again. I don't know that I'll leave it like this forever, but it's nice to have it all in one place for now.

After planting everything, I made the new plants' integration into the garden official.

Here are the kits enjoying their friendship with one another (sans the cactus kit, which I brought inside). Shortly after taking the photo, I moved everything but the tomato pot into a partially shaded area.

At this point, it's impossible to know how many of these seeds will grow into plants, if any. The weather should continue to be nice for another week or so, though, so I'm hopeful.

[gardenscience]

Experiment 4 - Coolest dirt ever

Let's get this party started, shall we?

As I showed in a previous post, the Valentine's Day grow kits I bought at Target (made by Buzzy Seeds) arrived home with all of the necessary components required to sprout some romantic plants. Pictured in the above photo are the seed packets resting atop their respective minuscule terra cotta pots. 

Each kit also came with its own "growing medium" pellet; a clump of compacted powder resembling some kind of astronaut's burger. Even with the teeny pots, the mediums weren't even halfway big enough to fill them and I was therefore skeptical of their success. The instructions told me to put about 3 tablespoons of lukewarm water in a bowl and then to place a medium in the center, so I did that.

I wasn't expecting the result to be so instantaneous and so... well, so awesome.

:O

That's the same thing, photographed only about 20 seconds after placing it into the bowl. The growing medium, as it turns out, is the organic cousin of the Fourth of July firework snake... except cooler, because it's freaking dirt for crying out loud, and who expects that kind of pyrotechnics from dirt? This is really great, because even if the rest of this experiment is a total failure, at least I can say I grew something.

It sort of broke my heart to destroy the magnificent towers of expansive soil, but I did it. For science. It was spongy to the touch and barely fit into the pots.

Here's a close-up of the forget-me-not seeds, which are large and spiny.

Here's a closeup of the strawberry seeds, which are darn near invisible.

The instructions told me to plant no more than six seeds per pot. I put exactly six forget-me-not seeds into the planter on the left. The strawberries? I have no idea how many are in there because they're tiny, dirt colored, and require superhuman observational skills to keep track of.

Here's the final product. Both of the planters are now resting on the same rack as the lemon trees. Hopefully I'll have another update to post soon as this Valentine's Day saga unfolds.

[gardenscience]

Experiment 4? - Love is in the Air (already)

One of the family cars had to be taken into the shop today after an unexpected breakdown on the freeway. Car problems in the middle of nowhere are never fun, but I generally try to look on the bright side when these things happen and view them as the inevitable beginning of a great mini-adventure. My mom and I were ride-less while waiting for a diagnosis on the car, so our mini-adventure involved getting some pizza and then wasting time at the Target next door.

Guess what I found in the $1 section at the front of the store! 

That's right, Valentine's Day strawberry and forget-me-not "grow kits!"  

Wait... Valentine's day? Isn't it December? Target's still decking the halls without any visible regard to future holidays, and yet these things were nestled snugly next to hoards of discount wrapping paper, Rudolph pens, and miscellaneous novelty objects plastered with images of Santa hats and menorahs. Either these were mistakenly put out too early, or the box they were in was lost last February beneath waves of shamrock-themed stuff and has only now resurfaced.

I took these photos in the car dealership's waiting room, which was a comfortable place with a free hot beverage dispenser. Also pictured: the best hot chocolate of all time.

After getting home, I disassembled one of the kits so that I could photograph it. The "growing medium" resembles a giant, flattened cocoa puff. I'll definitely take more detailed photos tomorrow when I actually start the experiment.

This will be Experiment 4, by the way. I'm not sure I want Garden Science to become entirely a blog staged on watching pre-assembled kits grow, so I am going to try between today and tomorrow to think of some way to make this experiment more interesting than just reading the instructions and growing the plants.

By the way, these kits were made by Buzzy Seeds, and their site has all kinds of cool gardening kits on it including a variety of other miniature ones. I cannot find the Valentine's day ones on there, but I'll keep an eye out.