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. 

lemon trees from seeds

I didn't make this and eat it, I drank it.

I've been making the most delicious iced tea lately. It verges on lemonade.

* two random Celestial Seasonings tea bags

* three watchyamacall it regular tea bags. Oh, what is it, Luzianne, this time but it could just as well be Lipton's

* 1/2 cup sugar

* 1 whole lemon

I heat a small pot of water nearly to boil, add the sugar to dissolve. Put in the tea bags. That's half of it.

The entire lemon squeezed into the 2 quart pitcher. When the tea darkens, I squeeze out the bags and dump the sweetened tea into the pitcher then fill it with filtered water. Done. It cools to room temperature, goes into the refrigerator.

Usually I drink the entire two quarts in one day. Rarely does it last longer than that, as the one that I have now has.

So that's a lot of lemons.

They're purchased by the bag-full from different sources. Some have a lot of pips. Oh, those annoying pips. Seeds to Americans. Discarding the seeds causes me some kind of nearly undetectable unease. I cannot quite put my finger on it. I allow my mind to free associate. I'm transported briefly to a period between kindergarden and first grade. With clarity I recall my father turning over to me dozens of tiny clay pots. They're positively delightful little toys, the way they stack so perfectly. I'm intrigued by their red bisque coarse perfection. I stack them different ways. Smash a few, of course, com'on, I'm a boy, we have to see how things break. Wonder why they each have a perfect little hole on the bottom. Wouldn't they be better without a hole? Why do they want the contents to fall out? This didn't make sense. I don't like that hole. I fill them all with dirt, and sure enough, some of the dirt falls out the holes. This is going to be a mess. I plant every seed that I encounter. Apple seeds. Orange seeds, mostly, but also grapefruit seeds, watermelon seeds, peach seeds, plum seeds, grape seeds, everything good that I like except vegetables because who in the heck wants vegetables?

Our house had an oriel window with a bench facing onto the front street. It was akin to a greenhouse extension. My parents, bless them, tolerated me lining the whole thing with my little clay pots. There were dozens of them. I think, nearly fifty. Can you imagine having a child such as myself with continuously multiple on-running experiments constantly interfering with your own sense of interior design? I can not imagine that myself and that's why I love my parents. They were true parents to me in every single encouraging sense and without exception.

But we moved frequently, and that overturned a lot of experimentation by fiat. I was always being undermined by the fait accompli of relocation. In this case, the plants survived one relocation but then we moved overseas so I turned over my best specimens, by then transplanted to larger pots, to my grandmother whose careless neglect I found hard to forgive. She killed my orange and grapefruit trees by leaving them outside in the Pennsylvania cold. I never looked at her the same since.

I'm back.

Well then. I see it now. Plant the lemon seeds. Bang. There they go directly into the dirt. So too the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And the next lemon. And so on until no more seeds will reasonably fit in the pot.

Weeks elapse. Nothing happens.

Why are not my seeds germinating? Yo no lo comprendo. Je ne le comprends pas. Could it be the seeds are two-year germinating seed, they type designed by evolution to delay, to spread out and deflect the threat of ecological hazard? Like passion flowers do? Should I nick the seeds or abrade them to allow water to access their innermost inside interiors? Huh?

Reads internet. Readie, read, read, humity hum, readie, read read. Sure enough. That's the trick. Peel the seed, carefully with an x-acto knife, like a banana, and get to the seed which is really underneath that harder outside coating, known commonly to crossword solvers everywhere as the "aril." That's what I'll do -- remove the aril. Or at least damage it.

I'm all set for phase II of the lemon tree from seed experiment. I wrap the seeds in wet paper towel, place in a sandwich bag and transport them to the warm sunny window next to the first experiment. Wait. What's that? Green I see? Whu? No. Yes. You di'int. You did. Oh, you tricky little bastards. You waited until I lost patience and found a shortcut, and then you show yourselves!

I am going to love you like a precious thing.

Update: The stripped seeds from a second lemon showed me I probably wasn't going far enough. By accident I ripped off the brownish under-outer-shell to reveal the ultimate naked innermost inside interior penetralia that feeds the embryo of the seed and that is easily broken in half, which happened to one of them. Oops. I believe this is the portion to aim for.

This is a little trickier to get at. I learned that by making careful slash through the length of the seed then using my fingernails to strip off the shell, like a banana, except how a monkey peels a banana, not how a human peels a banana, that is, straight through a center break like the alien bursting through a victims chest. This is where fingernails take over, and ah got no fingernails, see?

So if I can do it with those pathetic shortened things, you should be able to do it with whatever talons you got.