Tepee Trellis and Snap Dragon Flowers

 Would it not be nice to have a continuous supply of fresh green beans from the garden during the summer? Of course I would like that very much because nothing beats the taste of freshly gathered Green Beans from the garden. They taste so sweet when you cook them as soon as you pick them from the vines. So two weeks after I planted the second batch of Green Beans in the wire trellis, I came out with the idea of sowing more Green Beans in a tepee. We have some reed sticks that were left over from another project and they were just lying around at the back of my brother's house, so I decided to put them to good use by making a tepee trellis for the Green Beans. I gathered about 12 sticks and tied them together at the top by using a rope to form a teepee and then stuck the legs about 1-foot deep into the ground. As you can see in the picture below, there are two teepees on both ends of this raised bed and I sowed some 3-4 seeds of Green Beans around each stick.

I already harvested the Sweet Peas, the lettuce as well as the Pak-Choi that were planted in this same bed except for these Carrots because it takes about 5 months before they mature. After I harvested all the crops, the raised bed looked empty. I have always wanted to plant some Snap Dragon flowers but the plant section in the mall had nothing to sell at that time. So I visited my friend at the Baguio City Orchidarium and she didn't have any of these to sell as well. I was lucky because I found some seedlings that were for sale right next to my friend's stall and I bought some. I planted these flowers right next to the Carrots and after a couple of weeks, they bloomed! It was a pretty sight to look at and I am amazed at the life span of these flowers. They really lasted a long time that I decided to plant these again next season. I will be keeping the seeds once the flowers are spent and dried so I could sow them by next planting season and I need not buy the seedlings again.  I hope you enjoy the pictures as much as I enjoyed planting them.

Growing Celery From Seeds

The seeds of the Celery plant are very tiny. I had a bottle of Celery seeds in my pantry because I was using this before in making my bottled Green Tomato pickles. I thought that perhaps I could use the seeds to grow my own celery. So I took a spoonful of seeds and put them in a covered bottle and added some water just to cover the seeds and put the bottle inside the refrigerator for 1 day just to soften them up a little bit. Then I bought a plastic seedling tray and a potting mix from the garden section at SM mall and sowed my seeds thinly in the dish and covered this lightly with more potting soil mix. I took a big basin and placed the seedling tray inside then I poured some water in the basin, just enough to come up to about half the height of the seedling tray. By doing this, the potting soil mix will soak up the water from the bottom and this will prevent what the experts call 'damping off" of the seeds. This method will also prevent the seeds from being dislodged if I were to water them from the top. It took awhile for the seeds to grow and I was getting impatient as usual. Thinking that the celery seeds will not germinate, I took the seedling tray and dumped the whole thing inside a disposable plastic cookie container that I was going to throw out. You see, I wanted to use the seedling tray to sow another kind of seeds and I was running out of seedling trays so why not just dump the whole Celery thing and forget about it. Then one day as I was working in the yard, I noticed the Celery seeds sprouting out from the plastic cookie sheet where I dumped them to. I was really surprised by this and I just decided not to touch them and just let them grow to see what will happen. Then I realized that as they were growing, they were getting too close to each other because they got compacted when I dumped them. So I removed some of the taller ones manually and believe me, that was not easy at all because I was trying so hard to be very careful so as not to damage the roots. Then I planted the one that I pricked into individual black plastic bags and put them in the shade until they are big enough to be transferred to the ground.