Super fast videos of plants growing

Watching plants grow at home, see them sprout and discover new leaves is an amazing experience but you have to be very patient as it is a really slow process

Because of that, and because we are aware everyone is in a hurry nowadays, we found these amazing videos in youtube where you can see all that happens, even behind the land, and check what happens during this first days in just a few seconds.

Warning! These videos have music, so careful with sound level if you watch them at work 😉

Last video may not be visible here, but it is worth watching, even if you have to follow the link to youtube.

We hope you liked them!

The first sprouts of lettuce and spinach

Spanish version

It has been two days since the first lettuce sprouts came out and this morning we could also see the first spinach sprouts.

It is amazing how quick new sprouts came out and in just a couple of hours it goes from just earth to be 3 or 4 sprouts slightly bended but fighting to grow up.

Now taht we have sprouts, we move the seedbed to an area that has natural light but is still inside the house, so the temperature is warm and the new little leaves have the light they need to start producing energy for the plant.

As we don’t have plenty of natural light here at home we have set up a small lamp with a low consume light so our sprouts can get all the light they need.

Here you can see hou our 2 days lettuces look, and also the spinach sprouts that only have a few hours.

lettuce sprouts

spinach sprouts

A homemade seedbed

Spanish version

It is still too cold in the patio to sow any seeds, but we really want to start the vegetables garden, so we have decided to make our own seedbed inside the house, so we can see the seeds become sprouts and if we are luchy they will be strong enough to be trasplanted into the flowerpots when the weather becomes better and we have no risk of icing. We have just started January, and although the weather here in Barcelona is quite nice we have to be aware that there it is too soon to relax and a cold days are still around and can come back.

During last year we have been collecting seeds in different places and from different sources and now we have a small selection of those who we want to sow (and we never found time to put in a flowerpot before and let grow).

It has been a little difficult to understand the symbols in the seeds packages and also how to sow them, when, how and where. In the end we decided the months in wellow where the good ones and we took the risk with lettuces, tomatoes, carrots, aubergines, chards, basil, spinach and a chili that we have sow from a dry chili and we have no guarantees if it will come out.

About where to sow the seeds, there are in the market some wonderful seedbeds where you put one or two seeds in each small depertment and when they sprout you have them ready to be moved into the ground or in our case into a flowerpot, but we haven’t got one of them so we had to find a cheaper alternative, and what we have done is save the yougurt plastic container and cut the bottom of plastic bottles and a water carafe to use them as seedbeds.
It is quite likely that we find problems later to move the sprouts, but now what we are more interested in is in getting the seeds to grow, see what problems may appear and learn. All the seedbed thing is an experiment.

BEcause we won’t water too much the earth from the seedbed we won’t need holes in the bottom of the plastic recipients. This time we have put earth in them to the middle more or less.

After that, we hace scattered the seeds in each one of them, leaving behind the recipient the seeds package so we could know wich one was each and put a sign later with the name of the plant and the date we sow the seeds. Some sprouts can look very similar and it is a good idea to have them identified so we can give the plant its correct treatment from the beginning, it won’t be good to leave in the sun a plant that needs only some light and by the time we find out the mistake it may be too late.

We have to recognize thay we were very enthusiastic about shattering seeds and maybe it was enough with half or even less the amount of seeds we sow, but once we realized this it was too difficult to start getting them out the seedbed, so we will see how things go when dozens of sprouts come out of each recipient.

Once the seeds where shattered we covered them with more earth, like 2 oe 3 cm. It was a good earth, rich in nutrients. It is even better if you can find earth special for seedbeds, but we had a quite big sack of COMPO with seems to be quite good. Once we have this we need to carefully water the new seeds.

Once the seeds sprout they will be very delicate, and we don’t want to damage them while watering, nor to make holes in the earth because ir is very loose (we don’t have to press it once we put it in the seedbed) so we decided to water with a spray bottle. You can find it in many shops, they don’t need to be specific for gardening.

And last thing to do is to make a sign with a piece of paper with the name of the plant, the date we sow the seeds and fix it with celotape to the plastic container. And now, all we have to do is wait for them to sprout and water them a little bit every day as they need humidity yo germinate 🙂

Our first urban vegetable garden

Spanish version

First of all Happy New Year to everyone!

The year just started, and as usual we are all full of ney year resolutions and a lot of good intentions for the incoming year. In our case, with the help of some Christmas presents, today we have decided to start getting ready what will be our first urban vegetable garden.

At home we have a 3×3 meters patio, lots of interest on growing our own vegetables and aromatic herbs, some flowerpots, the essential watering can, some seeds, a piece of pressed coconut and a sack of earth.

First thing we have done is to soak the pressed coconut, following the instructions on the box. To be honest we had never listen about this coconut solution for growing plants, but a gardener recommended us this product as a way to recover earth from old flowerpots and give it a boost of nutritional contents, and the fact is that it looks great so far.

The coconut comes pressed like a brick  but gets soak very quickly. For a coconut brik we have added 6 to 7 liters of water and once it has soaked we get a volume of 9 to 10 litres of product.



While the coconut was soaking (in about an hour it was ready to use) we put up some metalic shelvesthat we bought in IKEA and we got ready the flowerpots.

The small flowerpots came without holes on the bottom to relief the excess of water, so we made them. In order to do that we heated up a bradawl in the kitchenfire (you can also do it with a candle if you have an electric kitchen), and we punched the plastic of the flowerpots.

It was quick and as the holes are small we won’t need stones to cover them so the earth doesn’t escape trough them.

The large flowerpots, wich are also made of plastic, had the holes done already, but they are quite big, so we had to put comething over them to prevent the earth to escape every time we water the plants. We didn’t had old pieces of ceramic flowerpots, wich are a good option, so we used some little stomes and covered them with earth before we filled up all the flowerpot, so we made sure they didn’t move later.

After that, we filled in earth and coaked coconut product at a 50% rate. We added earth from the sack to the recipient where we had the coconut soaking, and mixed all well. We recomend to use latex gloves every time we manipulate earth because it is a lot cleaner and they protect our skin if we have any lessions so they don’t get infected.

Finally, we have filled up the flowerpots on the following order:

– One layer of earth and coconut mix at the bottom.

– One layer of pure earth.

– Another layer of mix, until the middle of the flowerpot.

WE haven’t filled them up to the top because we don’t have anything to grow just now because it is January and is too cold to leave seeds outside, so we are going to grow them first in a seedbed and once they are big and strong we will move them to the flowerpots, so not filling them to the top save us to do the extra work of making a hole later and this way we will only have to put the little plant and fill up sith a good quality earth so they grow up healthy and strong.

And this is how it looks like so far and how we are going to leave our flowerpots until we have plants ready to trasplant.

Now, next step is to make a seedbed and grow the seeds. And this is what we will do next day we have some time off.