Plant-related resources

One day I would love to have a permaculture garden. But at the moment I have to make do with lots of pots, and my window-boxes. Here are some of the sites I'm using as reference/inspiration.

I love this site! It's my reference for:
- my little mango seed, although it wasn't the sort they suggest, with the several seeds inside the husk,
- passionfruit, which I fully intend to try again as soon as I buy more fruits,
- pineapple, as I have a top ready to plant as well as the previously mentioned surprise seeds in a germinating bag
- sweet potato, which I am having a go with even though we don't really have space for a big vine, or indeed a vine at all. It's going to be an indoor sweet potato trial, I have to convince my lovely husband to get a large pot.

I'd love to grow cashews, but it's not very realistic in a house with kids- check out the pictures though to see what they look like!

Here are some links about growing avocados...

and peppers...

and citrus.

Ideas for other things to grow including ginger root!

And of course the BBC and Wikipedia, which are wonderful resources for, well, everything really!

Gardening-related blogs I follow:
Down To Earth: Living the simple life in Australia. Posts about all kinds of things - check it out.
Blagger: These great people are trying to live self-sufficiently in a suburban town in the UK.
Weekend gardener: written by gardening industry professionals.
Godspace: Christine Sine's blog is about God, gardening and community, and how the three go together. I especially love her posts about how God speaks to her through her garden.
The Green Parent: This one is not so much about gardening, just the occasional item.

Pineapple seeds, who knew?

I am so stoked today because not only has my wildflower post been used over at learning cooperative ABCand123 - thank you, Katies - but at lunchtime we found seeds inside our pineapple! I have never seen this ever before. Little black seeds, like apple pips but smaller.
Which I didn't think to take a photo of, of course. But I have wrapped them up in some damp polyroll and put them in a plastic bag to see if any will root. I've also cut the stem off, as advised in various places on the Web, to see if we can make that grow too.

At the moment I am nurturing pepper seeds, pineapple seeds, birch seeds and a variety of other things I have found lying about and don't know the names of, all in plastic bags and kitchen roll. And today we planted out the entire contents of the seed tray (including a new mystery seedling, not a tomato this time - the last one was, by the way) so everything is in proper pots. The Engineer will be pleased!