Green Issues: Some pictures of my plants and pictures of flowers taken on my travels

Monday, August 24, 2009

Some pictures of my plants and pictures of flowers taken on my travels

Since this is an Environmental blog, I am going to add a few pictures of my plants and other flowers I come across on my travels. I used to have about four plants, which I put outside, but people keep coming to steal them in the middle of the night. My favourite was a nice rubber plant that I promised to look after for someone who was going back to America, many years ago. My neighbour appears to have this problem too, thieves in the night. It is either my plants get stolen or they die. My African violet died. *big sigh*. I have had about 4 African violet plants and they have all died on me, I am just not good with that plant.

Flowers on display at Westfield Shopping Centre

These are some purple flowers I saw when I was at the Westfield Shopping Centre in Shepherd's Bush. Nice aren't they?

At the moment I have one Crassula ovata otherwise known as a jade plant, good luck tree, or money plant. It appears to have a number of names, which I have maintained for well over a year now. For some time the leaves were looking a little yellow and the plant did not look so well. I went to buy some fertiliser and met a lady who gave me some of her liquid fertiliser while I was out hunting for some. We had tea and a long chat too and she told me how to maintain the Crassula ovata, which she said I had over watered. She advised me to leave it outside and take the plant out of the pot completely in order for it to dry out a little bit. Unsurprisingly, this worked as these plants do not like too much watering. They are known as succulents.

I plan on buying an aloe vera plant soon. Aloe vera plants are great because you can break off a branch, squeeze the juice out and rub it all over the skin to keep mosquitoes away, this was a good mix with citronella spray to avoid getting bitten.

Crassula ovata

Below is a rosemary plant I spotted on my travels.

Rosemary Herbs

I have tried my hand at growing my own fruit and vegetables both here and abroad. I have also grown scotch bonnet peppers successfully there and my brother grew some brown beans on a few occasions.

I have grown potatoes, spinach, onion, water cress and mustard. Potatoes and water cress are fairly easy to grow. Potatoes like lots of water and with a lot of sunshine you can easily get some really big potatoes. The spinach gave me a few headaches and had some kind of parasite growing inside it and eating the leaf from the inside out. I used to pluck off the leaves that had this problem and eventually the spinach grew big and strong and were able to withstand the pests. On many occasions, we enjoyed the spinach and it feels so good to be able to grow your own fruits and vegetables from time to time.

As part of my science course at college many years ago, we had to grow flowers from their seeds, but that did not go too well. As you can tell, I am not so good with maintaining flowers but I am better with plants.

Update 6th May 2011

Beautiful flowers on the concourse at Victoria station

Here is one of my Jade plants. When I bought it it was really small. I've changed the pot once because it has grown so big. I have others.....Nice isn't it?