Photo by Growing with Plants

A plant growing in a Click & Grow flowerpot is almost carefree, but all other houseplants need a little more attention. Today I would like to share with you two great sites that help to understand your plant-pet better.

Growing with Plants – is a great plant and design blog by Matt Mattus. The site has earned the reward for the best gardening blog 2011. We love Matt’s work also! The blog is filled with beautiful pictures and good advice.

Toataimed.eu – An affluent resource on different houseplants. The site is in Estonian, but Google Translate will help you cope with this. There are exceptionally clear and simple care directions for all most common houseplants. Strongly recommended by the Click & Grow team.

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What about a nice cup of herbal tea? In Estonia (that’s where we are at) temperatures now are around -25 degrees Celsius. Could there be a better time to write about tea?

Melissa

This month Click and Grow will release a couple of tea plants. One better than the other. The Melissa or sometimes called Lemon balm is a quick grower and makes the best minty tea ever. The plant sprouts in 7 to 10 days, grows to full size in 3-5 months and can live up to 18 months. A lovely plant and the tea is superior!

The second tea plant is Garden Sage, which has a long history of medicinal and culinary use. It has been used since ancient times for warding off evil, snakebites and increasing women’s fertility and it was one of the ingredients of Four Thieves Vinegar – a blend of herbs which was supposed to ward off the plague.

Garden sage

As a tea herb, sage has a slight peppery flavour and can be used to treat various colds. Basically it is an anti-sweating, antibiotic and antifungal agent. There is even scientific proof that sage may be a cure for Alzheimer’s disease! Seeds sprout in a week or two. The plant is a slow but steady grower and tolerates pruning and cutting – a perfect bonsai for beginners. The plant can live for up to 18 months, but some say that a sageplant never dies.

Even the painted nettle can be used for recreational tea. But we do not encourage experimenting with this in any way.

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Exploded Busy Lizzy Seed pod

Last week I wrote about cloning plants, but there are of course other options for multiplying plants. Today we talk about seed collection and growing.

All plants grow seeds. Some do it only very rarely. Seeds are a mechanism for evolution – when cloning reproduces identical plants, plants grown from seeds are a combination of the genotypes of the mother and father. Every combination is slightly different and this is the base for breeding new plant varieties.

So every seed you plant will grow into a truly genetically unique organism.

As the first step you need to get your plant flowering. This should not be so hard when using the Click and Grow system. It only takes patience. The Painted nettle, French marigold and Busy Lizzy are the easiest to start with.

The second step is not to pinch off all wilted flowers. Also keep in mind, that producing seeds exhausts the plant. If you want the best quality seeds, it is advisable to leave only a few “production” blossoms.

Wait and observe – the flower will turn into a seedpod. It may take a long time for the seeds to ripen. Ripe French marigold seeds are 1 cm long and almost black. They can be easily removed from the flower. The seeds of Painted nettle are black, round and smaller than 0.5 mm in diameter. Shake the flower gently and the seeds will fall on your hand. Busy lizzy is a little devil. The seedpods are explosive. Watch as the seedpods grow into little 1 cm capsules. When ready, the slightest fingertouch will trigger the seedpods to explode and throw the brown 1 mm big seeds in every direction.

Take the seeds and plant them in your garden. But more about that in a future post.

Take care!

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image from education.com

Plants are really cool organisms for one feature – they can quite easily reproduce themselves from only a couple of cells. This is called totipotency.

This gives the gardener additional options for making the environment greener – you may take a piece of the plant growing in a Click and Grow pot, and with enough luck it can grow new roots and start a second life. You can plant the new “clones” in your garden or give them to your friends. And if you wish, you can call the whole procedure cloning – the offsprings will be genetically identical to the parent.

This works almost flawlessly with our Painted nettle and Busy Lizzy. Here are some simple steps to help you achieve this.

1. Start with a full grown plant (at least 5-6 pairs of leaves). Easiest are Busy lizzies and Painted nettles.
2. cut the plant with a sharp knife. The cutted part should have at least 3 – 4 pairs of leaves.
3. Remove the bottom pair of leaves from the cutted part. The plant should have at least 4 leaves remaining.
4. put the plant to a glass or jar of water. Just like you would do with a common rose.
5. Put the plant in a light spot, but away from direct sun – the plant doesn’t have roots yet, so it can’t take up water that easily and may wilt.
6. wait for 2 to 3 weeks and check if new roots have appeared.
7. If you see roots with a lenght of at least 0,5 cm, you may transplant the plant.

Congrats! You have successfully cloned a plant. Let it grow larger, and if you wish you can clone the same plant again. You can use this method to multiplicate the plants with the best colours – they will stay the same. If you have luck the first time, then you can try to use smaller and smaller pieces of the plant. The smaller the piece the more offsprings you can get from one plant.

Hope you will have fun with this.

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