Sponge gourd (luffa aegyptiaca) I am growing this plant for the first time this year. It grew ok but started off making a mini cucumber with a female flower to begin with,


but there was no male flowers. Then for about one month or longer it only made male flowers. Now at the end of august it has finally grown another female flower with a miniature cucumber so i hand pollinated it. I hope there is still enough time for the plant to mature and grow this fruit so i can get seeds for next year. The luffa cucumber can be used as a sponge substitute in the kitchen to replace plastic sponges. I never tried it and it's my first year growing it. Only one seed from the three i was given germinated so i am hoping the plant will at least manage to produce one ripe fruit with viable seed.

























Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 I weeded all my malus sieversii trees and i lost quite a few to what i believe was a combination of deer, rabbit and rodent attacks. I think i lost between one fourth and one third of the 426 plants i grew from seed. I discovered some visually very amazing and different ones in two of the six seed batches. I singled out several unique ones that i planted in my polytunnel to grow them properly. I didn't have the time to protect the 426 as i would have liked to. All trees of the 4 other batches have basically green leaves. Here is one example. This is a very nice green leaved one. And another green leaved one. Already these two are different in leaf colour and shape. But i selected them from the batches where all had green leaves in order to be sure to have genetic diversity. I kept 18 seedlings in the polytunnel that contain some of every batch. The following ones are very special and unique and display many variations of red and green and even other colours. One seedling with nice
Read more

Monkey puzzle

Image
 Last year many monkey puzzle trees (araucaria araucana) around here made good nuts and for the first time i tried them. Raw they are ok, but not great like a raw sweet chestnut. Lightly roasted they are delicious. Roasted too much they turn hard and are less good. So i went and collected nuts under all the trees i could find and kept the biggest for sowing. I was surprised that they grow very easily if you don't let them dry out they germinate and grow quite well in poor soil. The seeds germinated very well and now i have quite a lot of young baby trees. One thing i love about them is that they don't need fencing. I heard that goats will eat them but my local wild life doesn't touch them. I will probably plant them all out amongst my larger ones. Lots of tasty nuts sometime in the future.
Read more
Image
 Gevuina avellana. Two of my chilean hazelnuts flowered this year. I found only one nut forming on each for now but i am very happy about that already and fruit set will surely improve. They have a great potential because they give tasty nutritional nuts, of which a very good quality oil can be extracted, and have many other useful qualities. They turned out to be one of the few experimental crops that actually grow very well here. If i can get the next generation to grow from seeds it will be the third generation sprouted here in brittany. I believe the more often you reproduce marginal crops from seed while selecting the quicker the plant can adapt. It still has some flowers that didn't freeze when we had frost.
Read more