Photos in this post and the next suck because I forgot my camera was set to shoot 640 x 480, so I can't crop or otherwise edit them.
In my daily obsessing over my plants, I noticed this:
A tiny, barely visible sprout. It's hardly thicker than a hair. Ok, it's actually a good deal thicker than a hair, but it's thinner than a violin E-string. It's very, very thin. You can hardly see it. And as we know by now, tiny sprouts come from tiny seeds.
On the other hand, in this psychedelic piece (I have no idea how I did the colours) you can see a huge sprout in the background, to give you a sense of proportion. That's a morning glory sprout. When you grow the same thing over and over, you get to know what's what by their sprouts. So on that theory, I looked in my photo archive for a similar sprout. The only thing I had in this planter before is pansies, but you never know what other zombies could be in there. All I can say is, this is not a pansy sprout. Besides, the pansies were hybrids, so they shouldn't be able to reseed themselves.
The other possibility is that it could be a jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema something or other). It does make quite small seeds, and I threw a few in that planter on December 6 and never heard from them again. And one thing I've learned with the baobabs and other "hard to germinate" seeds I've been dealing with lately is, seeds can take a long, long time to sprout. Which makes me wonder how many seeds that failed in my overcrowded garden would have succeeded if given time to sprout in nursery planters instead of fighting it out with fast-sprouting seeds.
This, on the other hand, does not look like any seed I've ever planted, and I rather think it's some kind of insect larva. I can't be sure, but just to be on the safe side, I removed it from the planter and flushed it down the toilet. A certain amount of insects is beneficial to plants, but they creep me out horribly and I don't want them hatching in my house. Except wasps. Wasps rock.
Anyway. Inshallah, this sprout will live long enough to be identified.
In my daily obsessing over my plants, I noticed this:
A tiny, barely visible sprout. It's hardly thicker than a hair. Ok, it's actually a good deal thicker than a hair, but it's thinner than a violin E-string. It's very, very thin. You can hardly see it. And as we know by now, tiny sprouts come from tiny seeds.
On the other hand, in this psychedelic piece (I have no idea how I did the colours) you can see a huge sprout in the background, to give you a sense of proportion. That's a morning glory sprout. When you grow the same thing over and over, you get to know what's what by their sprouts. So on that theory, I looked in my photo archive for a similar sprout. The only thing I had in this planter before is pansies, but you never know what other zombies could be in there. All I can say is, this is not a pansy sprout. Besides, the pansies were hybrids, so they shouldn't be able to reseed themselves.
The other possibility is that it could be a jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema something or other). It does make quite small seeds, and I threw a few in that planter on December 6 and never heard from them again. And one thing I've learned with the baobabs and other "hard to germinate" seeds I've been dealing with lately is, seeds can take a long, long time to sprout. Which makes me wonder how many seeds that failed in my overcrowded garden would have succeeded if given time to sprout in nursery planters instead of fighting it out with fast-sprouting seeds.
This, on the other hand, does not look like any seed I've ever planted, and I rather think it's some kind of insect larva. I can't be sure, but just to be on the safe side, I removed it from the planter and flushed it down the toilet. A certain amount of insects is beneficial to plants, but they creep me out horribly and I don't want them hatching in my house. Except wasps. Wasps rock.
Anyway. Inshallah, this sprout will live long enough to be identified.
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