Friday, May 30, 2014

Cacao Tree Progress

The  cacao trees are growing well. The leaf on the right is the topmost and biggest leaf on the plant.  It is about fifty percent bigger than the other leaves on the plant.  There are a total of seven leaves now, six on the main trunk of the tree and one on a side branch.  This is of course the one in the window of the main conference room.

The other trees are still smaller than this one even though they are in much larger pots with more room for putting down roots. They also have varying amounts of light.  The main plant still has pretty much all day sun through UV protective glass with a small break in the middle of the day while. Pot two has two trees with afternoon sun. It also has another tropical office plant and a pineapple plant growing in it. The trees have about five leaves each and have grown a couple inches in height since the last post. Pot three has three trees with only ambient outside light. It's been slow growing but still steady. The smallest one only has three leaves still  but it's really starting to grow faster. I might need to transplant these to separate pots so they can have a better chance to grow well. It shouldn't be to hard at this point but may get harder to do if they get much farther along. When I added dirt to the main plant it's roots were coming along but it was no where near root bound. I could only barely see the roots at the edges of the cup. In a couple more weeks I will be transplanting it into a real pot although probably not it's final pot. That will take some time before it can have enough presence in a room to merit it. It is in an office after all.

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Zuchini

The zucchini plant has been growing fairly well. So far there has only been one female flower to speak of. When I saw it open one morning I made sure it got pollinated and voila it started to grow. now if only it would make more female flowers we could have a nice side dish with dinner, or maybe a baked zucchini dish. At any rate, only one will not do for anything but a quick snack, but oh what a snack that would be.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Tomatoes

Tomatoes are doing well so far this year. These first ones are large cherry tomatoes. There are several plants and three of them so far have tomatoes developing to some degree or another. These are the largest of the group and were the first ones to make an appearance in the garden. That is of course not counting the other vegetables.

The next tomato here is an unknown variety and was the runt of a litter. I really didn't expect it to live where I put it but it surprised me and took off better than any of the other plants planted so far. I guess the pot it's sitting in was just the thing it wanted. Although the tomato shown started well past the large cherry tomatoes, it is at least twice the size of one of them. It is also the only pot on the side of the house that currently has plants I intended to plant there. There are a couple more but they only have weeds.

In with this plant there are also other tomato plants as well as an onion plant and what I believe is either a pumpkin or other squash type vining plant.  It doesn't seem to mind the company and it has kept any other weeds from growing in the pot with it. There are also several other newly forming tomatoes on this plant. Although I'm not expecting a bumper crop, this is already turning out to be a much better start to a year than last year.