Saplings from seeds are here, in my fifth attempt.
“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” – Thomas A. Edison
And we have a similar saying at my place - keep trying and there will be a day when success will feel bad to not come to you. You must have seen numerous attempts from me to grow saplings from seed and every time they failed, but I never gave up. The reason I wanted to grow saplings from seeds is to save time and money, and most importantly experiment with these plants in odd seasons, because we don't get saplings to buy in Nurseries as they know most people will like to grow plants only in Winter, as that is the best climate suited here. Also if I can master the technique, then even in Winter, I don't need to depend on Nursery, calling them multiple times, inquiring when their saplings are ready for sell. And it will be big savings - this year, I bought around 1500/- saplings for my pots and the society, add the petrol cost and time to that(should be more than double of that). So hope you get, why it's good to be able to grow our own saplings.
And now let me tell you the fascinating story behind this - last time when I moved my pots to the other side of the garden, I hired Bhimsen, about whom I wrote in this post. So I was telling him casually that I have never been success to grow plants from seeds but we will retry again. We got a dried inca full of seeds, directly from the all seasoned inca plant and after putting it and covered with soil, I was about to sprinkle water and that is when Bhimsen stopped me. He told to give very little water after 1-2 days and that did the magic. So most likely, that is where I was going wrong - giving water from the beginning. When these mini saplings came I was overwhelmed - they look so cute.
Now I am going to experiment this all seasoned inca in summer - we will see, if they grow at all. We get these flowers in market to buy and they come from Kolkata. The climate of Kolkata is not very different to ours, so I believe it should be doable. At one point I even thought to procure plants from there and joined a facebook group, searching for some contacts. But the genuinity of those sellers became questionable, and they did not agree to give small number of plants.
So this is going to be a much better no cost experiment in summer. And this prompted me to collect some seeds as well.
I love the french inca version and collected all four colors - red, orange, yellow and mixed.
This year I took extra care of putting them under sun before preserving - earlier I would just get those dried seeds from plant and keep it. That was a wrong process which I came to know after consulting to people in the nursery - there is always room for improvement.
And instead of wrapping them in a paper, I got these air tight pouches to keep them. I am also collecting the other inca seeds, but doubtful about their quality, this ones should work - will experiment in mid rainy season, when the weather cools a bit.
For now, the challenge is to use these saplings - never expected so many, so will give most of it to others for free, and replant them in another container, till I have the pots ready. Gardening never ends....
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