I’m posting this today (26 Feb 2023) so as not to overdo it. These lemon seeds and mint sprout were actually added a few hours after the original post about my thrown-together hydroponic rig.
LEMON SEEDS
After cutting a lemon for a recipe, I decided to try my luck with the seeds. I know from working with grapefruit seeds, citrus seeds have a hard outer shell which, if removed, helps the seeds to germinate faster.
Here the hard outer layer is beginning to peel off:
And here is a completely cleaned seed next to its shell:
First I peeled one:
Then I peeled a second:
Then I took a small planter cup, drilled out four or the drain holes and added a center hole:
I filled the bottom 3/4 of the cup with perlite (Making this up as I go, and in retrospect I may have been wiser to do it in the other order…we’ll see.
Then I filled the top 1/4 of the cup with peat moss.
Next I put the seeds just under the surface of the peat moss, ran water through the mixture.
Finally, I put the cup into the mesh such that the base of the cup is in the hydroponic bucket, beneath the surface of the water.
We’ll see on this, I have no idea if it will work.
MINT SPROUT
I planted mint seeds in doors during the winter of 2022, but they’ve really been doing very little that I can see, so I thought I might transplant one of the three sprouts that came up (I planted a shitload of seeds to get these three little sprouts), into the hydroponic bucket.
I used a plastic knife to gently remove the potting soil around one of the sprouts, until the root system was mostly exposed.
Little by little, I removed as much additional soil as I could from the roots, and once I was satisfied, I just dropped the little dude in through the mesh so his roots could get into the drink.
These are all gamble honestly…I have pretty much no idea what I’m doing but this is my favorite way to learn!
So that’s it! I’ll try to keep things up to date here as this experiment unfolds :)
Thanks for checking out some more of my work! As always, I hope you enjoyed witnessing as much as I enjoyed creating!
© Photos and words by @albuslucimus, except where otherwise indicated.
If you enjoy my content, check out the Albus Index!
Here you’ll find links to various post-groupings, so you can find all posts related to a specific topic quickly. Topics include lists of brewing recipes, flutes, crypto talks, rucking posts and an index of all acoustic covers. The lists are updated as new content is added, so they can always be used to quickly navigate my content.
