Experiment 8 - The harvest so far

Look at all the cool instant garden stuff!

From the top left moving counter clockwise, we have pinto beans, navy beans, lentils, and green lentils.

The number of pinto beans dried and ready for picking gets higher every day. The beans pictured above are from yesterday alone!

The number of beans per pod seems to range anywhere from 1 to 6.

This may not look like a lot of lentils, but it took a long time to hand pick them all. There are still a bunch more lentils still on the plant that have already dried and are waiting to be harvested.

The one green lentil plant ended up producing a lot more than I was expecting it to. They have a lovely coloration! As with the regular lentils, there are still a bunch more on the plant.

The navy beans aren’t drying quite as fast as anything else, but there should be a fair number of them ready within the next week or so. At that time, there will likely be more pictures.

Another round of “Meet the Garden” should be posting very soon!

Experiment 8 - Lentils and Green Lentils (MTG 6.1)

If you missed the last post, I’m doing edition 6 of “Meet the Garden” on a per-plant basis. First up, the lentils!

The plants appear to be done flowering and are absolutely covered in lentil pods. Many of the lentils within the pods look like they are at or nearing full size, too!

The above photo should provide some amount of context. 

The plants are looking as if they may be nearing the end of their season. Does anybody happen to know a good way of drying fresh lentils and/or get them out of their shells?

Experiment 8 - Meet the Garden (Part 5.1)

This “Meet the Garden” post is going to be a little different than previous ones because I’m breaking it up into two pieces. If I tried to fit everything into one post, I’d end up with something as long as the film strip for Titanic and I’m relatively certain nobody has an attention span that long… myself included.

I tried to include a view of our entire garden. If this is your first time joining Garden Science for one of these posts, the box closest to the camera is Garden Science’s “Instant Garden,” otherwise known as “Experiment 8,” and the items therein are grown almost exclusively from seeds found in the kitchen. Behind the instant garden are our tomatoes, and behind those are the peas - they are currently a little out of control and there’s no way we can eat everything they’re growing. The giant-leafed thing closest to the camera is one of our sunflowers, and it’s nearly as tall as I am.

Here’s another view. On the right you can see our lima bean crop, which is coming along nicely. 

Anyway, on with the update!

Lentils and Green Lentils

The lentils got really lanky and then fell over. Now, it’s a little difficult to tell where one plant starts and another stops. The green lentil plant is virtually identical to the regular ones, and it’s buried somewhere in the upper left of the lentil cluster. See the little white flowers? The plants are totally blooming!

The flowers are very pretty, but they’re also tiny. The above photo shows flowers from the green lentil plant, but the flowers on the regular lentil plants look nearly identical. They seem to bloom in mostly groups of 3 and occasionally 4.

Even more exciting than the flowers are the tiny lentil pods they leave in their wake. I discovered these today, and you can already see the little lentils forming inside!

Popcorn

The corn is one of the most impressive things in the garden right now. I accidentally cropped out the bottom of the plant in this photo, but I measured them today and they’re both about 34” tall from the base to the top of the highest leaf. They seem to be right on target in terms of growth for this region and time of year, if not better.

Here’s a birds-eye view.

Garbanzo Beans (Chickpeas)

The garbanzo beans were planted later than the other things around them, and they are difficult to photograph because they kind of blend into the scenery. Like most of the other things growing, I had no idea what they would look like or what to expect when they came up.

The leaves are almost rather cilantro-like.

Mystery Plant

I still don’t know what manner of weed is growing in my garden, but it looks like it’s about to bloom. It was getting kind of gigantic and threatening to take over the garbanzo beans, so I took the gardening shears to it and pruned it back in several areas. 

That’s it for part 1! Part 2 will likely be up a little bit later today.

Edited for minor errors at 2:04PM.

Experiment 8 - Meet the garden

I finally managed to take some sort of decent photos today. In celebration, I put together the post I’ve been meaning to assemble since I planted the instant garden in the first place. Here are all of the plants that have come up so far, from closest to the sidewalk to furthest:

1.  Pinto Beans

2.  The lone Navy Bean

3.  Popcorn

4. Lentils
 

5. Green Lentil (super mega closeup)

The barley still hasn’t come up. Also, it turns out the “green sunflower” I planted is apparently something called… pepita? I’m not sure. I know absolutely nothing about it. The seeds may have even been dry roasted, which would definitely reduce my chances of success. Anyway, in the case of both the pepita and the barely, I did the rational thing and simply re-planted them in ridiculous numbers. 

Theory: If I plant enough seeds, something’s bound to come up eventually. Right?

Experiment 8 - Lentils!

The lentils AND the green lentils are coming up in Garden Science’s experimental vegetable garden!

Here’s the green lentil.  ^

Here’s the regular lentil.  ^

The lighting was not at all conducive to macro photos today, but I think I managed to capture both plants decently enough. I planted three of each type, and I think I can see new plants coming up alongside the ones in the photos.

The rest of the garden should be on its way!