Like yesterday, today I placed five seeds each of four different plants into plastic baggies on damp paper towel. They are Balsam, Cypress Vine, Squirting Cucumber and Yukon Chief Dwarf Sweet Corn.
Balsam is an old-time favorite of mine. It’s in the Impatiens family and grows as bushy plants that have a very lengthy bloom season. They begin by growing as a single vertical stalk and the flowers start to open from the bottom upward. After the lower flowers are spent, side branches begin to appear that also begin blooming. They are extremely popular with many species of ants, as both the flowers and stems tend to exude both nectar and sap that ants tend to find irresistible. A common name for Balsam is Touch-Me-Not, as the seed pods will explode, sending seeds flying in all directions when you touch them when ripe. As you might guess, this means they readily self-seed when grown out in the garden. The flowers are bright and release a decent amount of scent as well.
Cypress Vine is also a favorite of mine. Related to Morning Glories, the Cypress Vine is a very fast-growing climbing vine that will quickly cover fences and posts. The leaves are incredibly beautiful, fanned out like deeply detailed feathers. These plants will very easily self-seed and once they make their presence known somewhere, will generally come back year after year after year. The flowers are small, star-shaped, and come in red, pink and white. If you want to have humming birds in your garden, this is most certainly a plant for you to keep around.
Squirting Cucumber is a truly strange and remarkable plant, growing as a weed in Greece and surrounding areas. The bush-like vines often grow in poor soil and the fruit they produce are like large hairy green goose eggs atop tall stems. As the seed pods mature, they swell with fluid and the point where the fruit and stem meet starts to weaken. When animals brush by them, the fruit detach and the pressure built up within the fruit cause a thick, gelatinous mucilaginous fluid to spew out, taking seeds along with it. Streams of this fluid and seed mixture can shoot up to twenty feet away from the parent plant. Since the mucilaginous fluid is also extremely bitter, if the seeds spray onto the fur of the animal that displaced them, the animal will be reluctant to remove it, allowing the seeds to potentially travel great distances before falling from the fur on its own after some time has passed.
Yukon Chief Dwarf Sweet Corn is the smallest variety of sweet corn in the world. Developed at a university in Alaska, this corn was bred to have a very short growth cycle, around 55 days as opposed to traditional sweet corn requiring around 100 days or more. Also, this corn will grow in temperatures of around 65 degrees F, lower than traditional corn. Generally, this corn will grow approximately three to four feet tall and averages around four ears of corn per plant. Rarely does one consider corn being a crop that is grown indoors, but I’m going to give it a shot. It must be noted, however, that all varieties of corn are pollinated through wind, and so some degree of knowledge and effort must be undertaken in order to get corn to produce edible kernels if it is grown indoors.
Well, that’s it for today. So far I’ve prepared eight different plants to grow from seed. Check back tomorrow to see what other interesting things I’m going to start growing!