#spearmints

(Click on pictures to enlarge) So today, after days of off/on hardening with my potted spearmints, I planted one! I planted it in an area where we’ve had consistent problems with vines growing there, and since I can’t really excavate the area and eradicate all vine-life, I decided to use the spearmints instead. My hope is that since mint plants are basically like a horizontal vine, it’ll grow in such a way that it will help to prevent the growth of budding vines. Or maybe it’ll slow them down. Either way, I planted my first indoor-grown plant today, so there's an achievement :D Observe in the first picture, those white ‘cords’? Those are actually the stolons spearmints push out to propagate themselves and make new spearmint plants. As you can see, they have become what I call “stolon-bound”, like root-bound, but stolons instead. Some were almost two feet long! As a result of my digging around, I disturbed some moss. I put some into a pot that I put a hypoestes into today, to see if I can’t get it to propagate. And my aloe vera has made a full recovery! And has a 4th leaf growing now.

Take a gander at these beauties…

So I decided to put my hypoeste that was in the tote-hydroponics into a pot, replacing its place with another hypoeste from the aerogarden. I had two in the aerogarden, but they’re crowding each other and having problems, so by having only one plant in the aerogarden, it'll have all the space it needs for awhile. I also put the aerogarden down a shelf so I have more space for the new potted plant. Let’s hope it doesn’t die, eh?

February 24th, 2017 These were planted on 1/17/2017. That means its been just over a month. If you have any doubts about growing the results of something hydroponically VS in a pot, may this change your mind! Although I don’t like how the root systems changed from pure white to a yellowish. Science must be done to investigate why.

So! Today I transplanted the remaining spearmints from the Aerogarden into the black pot thingies, as shown above. I plugged in a “Lots of Dots” pack into my Aerogarden, so we can expect some crazy stuff soon from that. Oh, and my spearmints that I put into my newest hydroponics unit are going absolutely nuts, and are shooting runners out into the water, looking to propagate. I found out today they LOVE to reproduce, are incredibly invasive, and I couldn’t find ANY documentation on growing spearmints hydroponically to figure out if I need to be aware of anything. I do plan on experimenting with those runners/stolons, though. I’m going to let them grow out longer, and then cut a few off and see if I can’t make new spearmints from them. I guess I was busy today.

March 8th, 2017 All my plants are growing quite nicely! My mushrooms grow bigger and bigger with each passing hour (not really exaggerating actually). What you see is the accumulated growth from the past few days!

February 5th, 2017 So its been about a good couple weeks since my youngest plant children have surpassed their deceased siblings. I'm quite pleased.

May 28th, 2017 Here is one of the spearmints I was processing after I removed it from my hydroponics unit. Yes, it looks cruel, I will admit. But the plant was diseased and dying, and there’s not much I could do for it anyways that wouldn’t help propagate the disease. At any rate, I thought it’d be interesting to share this. That weird mushy mass with the two cut stems at the top, and with tons of roots poking through it? That’s the growing medium I use to grow my plants hydroponically. Rockwool, I believe it’s called. But to actually hold one with a plant in it - I was holding the heart of the plant. It’s pretty wild, yo!