It is a first all-sunny day in a wave aka a heatwave in a long while. Consequently I had to mess with a decorative flowering plant (yellow Streptocarpus) that royally dries up in just a couple of hours under direct sunlight and requires frequent watering under such conditions. It is all because of the kind of leaves it has. Even its waxed i.e. extra water-retentive leaves bleed moisture like no tomorrow. That is I get for messing with plants not developed for farming conditions. The ability to sustain sunlight and to turn it into accelerated biomass growth without drying to death in just two days is a typical trait of any economically significant farming species. My guess that the priorities with decorative plants is fast growth to the pretty flowering phase and a high retail value.

The different structural leaf types I have discovered so far are:

1. cotyledons aka the initial seed leaves [ often flat and symmetric ],
2. true leaves aka late leaves [ the fuzzy, hairy, non-flat leaves ]
3. flowers [ yes, they are specialized leaves ],
4. flowering plant leaves [ extremely noticeable veins ] and
5. single-leaf plants [ e.g. chives and grasses ].

It seems that true leaves are the ones tasked with photosynthesis i.e. plant growth. I took some photos of my plants. I noticed two main styles of true leaves based on the vertical growth rate of the plant.

1. Soaring plants keep the seed leaves on top and sprout most extra leaves below them, most likely for support. This thin growth style maximizes the sunlight gathering by shadowing the bushier species and often promotes fruit growth. The fact that most major fruit producers are either trees or sparse bushes supports this idea. Examples: tomato and cucumber.
2. Grounded plants grow their extra leaves to reach above the cotyledons as the plants are not generally very tall. The plants grow more horizontally and tend to form short, thick, self-supporting bushes. The thick structure limits the sunlight i.e. the biggest growth bottle-neck and consequently the fruit or berries are generally quite small. Additionally, the most covered plants either do not grow fruit at all or the growth is stunted. The additional strategy I have noticed is the tendency to produce a big number of grass-like, very thin true leaves for support and to reach the surface often blocked by other horizontal species or even soaring plants. In practice, tallest carrot plant I have grew under the shadow of radishes. Ultimately, there is a structural cap to how high the horizontals can get. Examples: carrot, chives, radish.

Leaf photos:

1. A cactus-plant Sempervivum [ super waxy leaves, no sunlight issues ]
2. A flowering plant Streptocarpus [ might req. a big pot for moisture storage ]
3. Carrot with the “rabbit-ears” cotyledons
4. Basil w/ spade-shaped seed leaves and sideways-sprouting true leaves
5. Chives w/ the grass-like structure and the dark seed tip
6. Spinach w/ split cotyledons
7. Radish w/ the fuzzy true leaves and the peach-shaped seed leaves
8. Watermelon w/ late and tiny true leaves
9. Cucumbers w/ small true leaves
10. Tomato w/ twin-triangle cotyledons

The non-photo-ed basil is a thick patch of 2.0″ / 5.0 cm tall grass. It looked extremely boring. I mostly wrote this thing to document the unique shape of tomato seed leaves.

Bluntly put, I noticed half a dozen of triangle-shaped twin-cotyledon seedlings in a positions I recall planting the tomato seeds at. I assume the lack of seed priming in wet conditions produces very slow initial growth in the more complex plants such as bushes and trees. It is going to become a bit crowded in the tomato box.

According to a page ( https://www.hunker.com/12000223/sunlight-vs-artificial-light-in-plant-growth ) , most electric lights produce mostly the wave lengths of light such as green and yellow that plant leaves absorb the least. Hence the green and yellow-tending default colours of leaves — those are the colours that the leaves reflect back without absorbing them into sugar-creating processes. Needless to say, my pet radish box with the least sunlight exposition looks the worst. I would need special blue or red lights to simulate sunlight. I have proceeded to subject the ailing radishes to much more sunlight.

I have some white mold. That is the product of using porous, soft oat flake boxes and compost sod with a ton of stuff for the mold to decompose. It is most likely the usual household mold mostly associated with expired foodstuff. It does not infest anything that is not already rotting. My guess is that its mold spores are activated by moisture and decomposition gases such as CO2 and methane. Currently the white mold is mostly interested in decomposing the cardboard boxes.

Oh yeah. I have concluded that the CO2 headache currently only happens in the immediate proximity of a large sod source. This lends a lot of credibility to my hypothesis of the local biomass containing most of the CO2 soon after it is released in the air.

I transplanted the water melon seedlings today. Have some pictures.

1. The radish boxes.
2. Dill
3. Spinach
4. Chives with a carrot cluster in the middle
5. Radish with a carrot cluster (it is the original seed priming packet i.e. tons of seeds there)
6. Watermelon
7. Tomato (probably failed, overtaken by carrots)
8. Cucumber
9. My by-the-window setup
10. Overview of most radish boxes
11. My pet radish box [ an experiment to see if extra lighting makes a difference  in growth ]

I do not expect to there to be anything post-worthy about the plants for at least a couple weeks it takes the first radishes to start maturing. That would be around May 7th 2019. Even then, it will not be much more than some radishes getting cut up. Rest assured, I will be using up this sod/soil down to the last nutrient molecule. There is no need to get excited as that most likely involves a lot of boring radishes getting planted. There really is not much to do in gardening outside the planting and the harvest. I bet a lot of farmers grow dairy just to have something to do on a daily basis.

Currently, I have non-sprouted tomato and sprouted cucumber in their end-game boxes. I got some soil for them, with a bag to spare for the water melons (currently only two seedlings are visible). I am going to get some barbecue sticks and craft supports from them when needed for tomato and cucumber.

Gardening gets stagnant really fast. It is first some work (depending on how well you plan it, not much if done smartly), later it is all about watering and trying to forget about it. I am not going to plant anything new soon. The sod carrots i.e. my de facto weeds are doing a good job planting themselves on their own. There are not many boxes without some renegade carrots growing in there. I find them hilarious.

A key observation is that cucumber seedlings already have the scent of cucumber fruit. They also build roots very fast. The underground growth rate reflects the above-ground biomass growth rate.

I finally got a big enough a box to plant a couple tomato seeds in. That thing ate about 40 l of my soil. Now my growing seedlings get to absorb all that CO2 it is going to produce. To be fair, CO2 has not been felt ever since the radish leaves turned green. Those things must be eating it like no tomorrow. I have spare big boxes, though not enough soil to plant anything onto them. I am going to take a short break from planting for now. At some point I am going to get some extra soil for some tomato plantin’ action.

Now every plantation that matters has surfaced on schedule. The cucumber and the spinach cotyledons aka the first leaves are quite pointy. Planning to sparse-plant some tomatoes later. The major issue with them is that they require a lot of space, e.g. those feet-wide pots or equivalent for each seedling and one seed bag has 80 of them. Currently I have utilities for the whole 0 of them in stock. I need to find some big boxes before proceeding with the plantation.

Update: I scooped up the remaining sod and used it to transplant 100 radish seedlings. Now all the sod carrots are liberated.

Only dill, chives and the patient cucumber have not sprouted at this point. Melons do not count as they are my fruit soup fun project. Radishes growing like crazy as usual. I decided to stop transplanting them after another 150 today and concluded that it is much more practical time-wise to buy and plant new bags instead. Those dill seeds are flimsy as hell. Those weeds and weed-likes must have a very miserable germination stage with a huge chunk of seeds either progressing very slow or outright dying before they even reach the seedling stage that normally takes a week. After that milestone, they usually grow like a major nuisance. 😀 Well, at least basil made it. Spinach too.

A newbie tip: DO NOT START WITH HERBS — they grow like ass and might still die even in greenhouse conditions. You need to learn with something that visibly adapts to your stupid mistakes and grows fast enough for you to not lose interest. Try radishes. If you want to start with a slightly more challenging radishes that still grow fast, try to get the bigger Daikon radishes. Radishes are of very little maintenance. You can always try potato . Just plant those unpeeled, muddy potatoes into a very deep (two feet / 0.50 m — no exaggerating) flower pot and you’ll have a nice plantation with little work.

8.0 hours later I come to check out the plants before having some lunch [I know, the eating times 🙂 ], there are more new sprouts and a new mound on top of my the plantation. After two seconds of digging, I start getting thematic mold infestation flashbacks.

Later I found out that there were 500 to 1000 sprouts there. Each of those tiny clusters has about two dozens of them. I transplanted about 250 of them in three hours until I had to take a breather and there seemed to still be more than half of them left. That is quite a lot for a radish seed bag sold for 60 cents. Maybe they really liked my fertilizer-level soil or the above-average CO2 concentration in the air. I am going to continue transplanting later. Like usual, I have plenty of more stupid experiment ideas to try out. E.g. taking a couple seedlings to a smaller box and having it near my spaces, potentially eating away the local CO2 and taking advantage of the almost-constant lighting. I will never leave lights on for some plants, though can be use the same ones I use.

That is all about radishes. I dug a bit into chives, basil and cucumber soil. Chives will sprout in a day or two, cucumber has recently started growing some root and basil… it is a borderline weed, yet it was only slightly further ahead of cucumber. That thing is going to cause me trouble.

Key observations: DO NOT COMPRESS THE SOIL IN THE SLIGHTEST. Otherwise the sprouts will not be able to penetrate it and you just made your later work more difficult for yourself.

P.S. Almost forgot. I found a lot very small roots that belonged to carrots. I transplanted about 50 of them to see if I can summon anything out of them. They looked healthy to me, though hanging inside a dark, cool bag might not be the favorite past-time of orange things. They are most likely going to be popping up every now and then on my plantations.

Briefly: the unintended greenhouse conditions will continue at full force for least five days AND I remembered that high CO2 is actually good for making the crops bigger.

A brief synopsis of so far, I have a lot of CO2-generating sod [a lot of sod, not the generation as it is basic compost stuff]. Currently, the sod bags are the minor CO2 sources while the half a dozen plant boxes are the majority. My only green plants ATM are of the slow-growing type or past their primary growth phases and thus they cannot contain the extra CO2 very much. It takes a couple more days before the plantations surface and start collecting the CO2 to create leaves, flowers and fruit. I feel tempted to plant water melons as they are famously very fast in terms building biomass ( read: containing CO2 ), though they probably require an extra deep box full of sod.

A key observation: if you want to incite plant growth, you probably want to have a liter or two surface-wet outdoor-grade sod to up the general CO2 concentration near the plants. It is claimed to increase plant growth significantly and greenhouses employ it for that and the heat-preservation reasons. Just do not put them near where you “live” without significantly lowering the sod volume. You can start with half a liter, that is probably on the safer side, and increase the amount gradually as your plants multiply. If the sod grows inert in that use, turn it around a bit and rewater it. Most likely it will not run out off CO2 stockpiles during 6.0 or 12 months, so do not add more outdoor sod without a good reason.

P.S. I decided to try priming one of the melon seed bags to hasten the process a bit and to make sure they sprout up pronto. I will have an extra thinly layered sod box that I am going extend later. I will pre-cut the bottom off and tape it back to make its extension easy when the seedlings mature.

Once I started drying the moist topmost sod thinly layered on newspapers, the amount of emissions went down radically. I no longer feel mildly crushed by the headache. I tripled the drying efforts. Currently the only place where the emissions get straining are right next to the source sod. I could hasten the process by planting my deep-rooting seeds, though things are pretty good right now.

I planted these species since the last time: radish, spinach and cucumber.

I have concluded that the fumes from the sod is most likely CO2 based on the fact that I can temporarily get rid of the headache by deep-breathing a couple of times. Wrapping a T-shirt over my mouth to serve as a makeshift filter greatly reduces the rate of CO2 accumulation.

On to the business. I planted dill and basil to take advantage of the moist soil and to speed up its drying. I cut a flake box vertically in half and put about a liter of sod into each of them. I planned to plant some radishes on a full two-liter cut-open box later.

The carrot seeds are currently randomly mixed with the soil in the bags. I might get some surprise carrots growing on my plantations.

After a couple of days, the carrot sod started to emit either dirt dust micro-particles or unidentified decomposition fumes, causing moderate-strength headache and coughing. Based on the fact that the coughing fits did not coincide with the headache, both the dust (=the coughing factor) and decomposition fumes were involved. I repacked the sod into the original sod bags and put it in the bathroom (with a ventilation) taped shut.

Two things to consider about indoor gardening: 1) get dirt/sod made specifically for indoor use, and 2) deploy at most 0.5 times the sod liters per your apartment m2’s. Mine was 1.8 i.e. a way too much. I’ll deploy new seeds little by little once the sod dries a little and stops fuming.

As you can see, I taped together some spare oat flake boxes to produce a makeshift flower bench. It might fall apart if water it too much, so I am most likely going to water it super conservatively and eventually reinforce it. As you can see, it is two feet i.e. 61 cm wide. It became rounder than I expected when I added the soil. My 90 liter sod can fill it up to the very minimum of 12 inches i.e. about 31 cm that long carrots require.

There is multiple layers of newspapers  in the bottom separated by a plastic barrier made from plastic bags to make sure the water does not not simply flow through the papers before getting soaked in. The only thing I explicitly paid for in this pot is the duct tape keeping it together. Most major retail stores do not even sell two feet wide pots, 1.5 at most. The paper spots are from the priming bag. I could not separate all of the seeds, so I decided to save effort and plant the whole thing in small pieces.

I just needed to hack this quickly together as I have preparations for formal appointments that I need to make in time.

A side note: I noticed that the soil bags alone would make so-so growing benches on their own, especially for the less sensitive ones such as the above-the-ground crop species. I have already plans for those emptied soil bags. They are made of pretty good, stretchy plastic. I could recycle as half-ready growth beds. I have a ton of new seeds that need places to grow on.

I have primed i.e. kept in water a packet full of long carrot seeds. If I was to follow the instructions accurately, I would need to accommodate whole 10m2 room for just the carrots. The product is sold by a German style chain, so I know they are not kidding around. I calculated that I would need 3000 liters of garden soil for it. The main problem with the big soil mass is that it would make moisture damage very likely if the it simply started to let the irrigation water through. The carrots in particular require very soft soil, making it even more likely. Irrigating the topmost one-inch layer as the guides instruct involves a lot of water.

Whenever you face high risk for low gain, half-ass the risky part and focus on getting the gains as lazily as possible while avoiding the risk factor. That is what I live by. In practice, I am going to get the 80 l of gardening soil from store and that is it. The guides underline that my “long” type carrots need 10 to 15 ” depth, so I am going to give it to them, all the 38.1 cm. That leaves me with an about 0.48 m x 0.48 m area. I will plant the seeds on that and once it eventually gets crowded, I’ll pull out the extra seedlings and transplant them onto another 0.5 m x 0.5 m soil cube. They’ll be weakened by the process, though most likely good enough for seed production. I will counter the moisture hazard with the pile of old newspapers and plastic garbage I have lying around. 😀

Now for some carrot info: carrot is a biennial species, meaning it will make seeds in the spring of the second year and die (horribly). It is theoretically possible to buy fresh carrots from a store, plant them and get some ripe seeds out of them some time later. Like most root vegetables, a carrot will start growing stems and leaves when exposed to moisture and light. As long as it can maintain plant growth functions, it will keep producing antioxidants and resist rotting. Even a dug-up and exposed carrot will turn green and start photosynthesizing, which is why carrot-growers need to pile on more dirt on it when it nears its maturation point to keep it orange and non-bitter.

Off-topic notes: If you think carrot is weird, just wait until I get to potato. That one is a perennial aka multi-year species that spreads like a fungus and is very difficult to kill. Note: ‘sweet potato’ is a different species aka batata that coincidentally tastes like a sour carrot. A protip: always replace batata in recipes with the much cheaper carrot. I am planning to get some potatoes for seeding purposes. The potato is its seed. Also some water melon for similar purposes. I considered orange, though I do not have interest for growing stuff that most likely will never bear fruit despite all the effort.