plants from seeds from grocery store food

These are the baby lemon trees in which I am well chuffed. They are growing in a bedroom window that faces West. 

They were planted June 2010 from seeds from lemonade lemons. The first pot of seeds was kept moist for a month with no sign of germination. Finally a plant appeared, it was discovered the pips possess a hard coating that delays germination. When that hard coating is removed then germination is hastened by weeks if not months. This seed coat removal is described here. An update to newly germinated plants a month later is shown here. So that whole starting out took months of discovery.

Saving the seeds, removing the hard outer seed coats, saving up egg cartons, and planting persisted for another month or so, every day a new batch of lemon seeds. It became ridiculous. At last I was happy again to throw away seeds for the egg cartons became so numerous spread all around the house on every available window sill, and the demands of keeping them all wet, the habitual peeling of lemon seed husks with the use of X-Acto knives, now an obsessive compulsion was a total pain in the buttimus maximus. 

These habanero pepper plants ↓ were started in November 2010.

Habanero peppers are very easy to grow but how often does one buy them? Almost never, that's how often. In fact, all peppers are easy to grow. They are self-polinating and wind-polinating, so inside with insufficient air current to carry pollen from one flower to another even on the same plant, they must be hand-pollinated. Greenhouse cultivators do this by shaking the plants. Trouble is, the flowers are delicate and a little bit testy. If the plants are too wet then the flowers tend to drop before they can become pollinated. If the plants are to dry then the flowers tend to drop before they can become pollinated. Too wet, too dry, same thing, and I weep at the sight of a pot of pepper plants surrounded by dozens and scores flowers that have fallen overnight because each fallen flower represents one less chile that would have grown and so lost its chance that season. Chile plants are annuals but with a little care they can be treated as perennials and if you are skillful and a little bit lucky you can get them to endure for years almost like a bonsai plant. I forget what happened to mine. It lasted several seasons, produced throughout the year, finally it gave up the ghost, and that made me sad. So here we go again. 

But this ↓ is what induced me to show you these plants from seeds from grocery store food. 

These are red chile plants that I first mistook for red jalapeňos but are actually something similar. I think the plants grow to some four feet with a tendency to spread. The shape of their stem indicates they most likely are the pendulous type chile. I thought at the same time I planted the habanero seeds that I didn't want tall scruffy chile plants wildly rambling for window space but then I thought, "What about another window? Maybe I could train them to spread across an entire window and form a sort of chile curtain. Wouldn't that me neato?"

Chile seeds require heat to germinate so I provided two pots with an electric blanket, by then Winter had set in. The habanero seeds germinated short of ten days as expected but these seeds did not. Weeks went by, every day with that stupid electric blanket which for safety reasons shuts off automatically at eight hours which forced me to see to the seeds three times a day week after week. I became a slave to these goddamn seeds which for some reason were not germinating. Finally, after a month, I gave up, but I was so disgusted, or possibly just lazy, I didn't bother to fold up the blanket and put it back in its plastic storage zipper bag. Such a pain. Such a sorry failure. I got disgusted all over again whenever I saw either the blanket in one room still wrapped around the pot as I left it under a table by the window, or the zipper bag in another room, so it was doubly disgusting all the time. Yesterday I grabbed the blanket to put it away and put the failure behind me, when I discovered these plants growing in the dark under the blanket like white asparagus, pathetically stretching upward toward light that was blocked by three layers of electric blanket. I nearly pissed myself with glee mixed with self-reproachment for not having checked sooner. Just one day with light and the plants are already getting a little color.