A few months ago, I started gardening. Yes, you read it right, gardening, here in HK. Indoor gardening, in the small confines of my home. I have always loved gardening and growing plants, but my favourite to grow are edible plants. I want to be sustainable even in just little ways as the herbs I use for our meal or some small fruits or veggies that I can grow in a container. My dream is to someday have a home with a very big garden full of edible plants and trees. I want them fresh and within reach! And so, I started this dream here as a practice, to check if my big green thumb is still working. I started with a chilli plant that my husband’s colleague gave us, then I added some tomatoes which I grew from seeds, I also tried spring onions. I want to plant what my hands can grab, if I see veggies that our helper bought from the market and it has roots, I try to plant them. Which brings me to my latest harvest, my very own mint in a pot.

These mints started when my hubby bought from an international grocery shop here – Fusion – a pack of mint leaves for his cooking, that is sometime in the last week of March. He loves to add herbs in his spaghetti recipes. But as expected, he wasn’t able to use up all the mints in the pack and had them sitting in the refrigerator for about a week. I do random checks in our ref for stuff that might be expired or on the verge of being rotten and I found these.

 

I have been reading up or rather watching videos on youtube on growing plants and in one of those videos is about rooting, or growing plants from cuttings. So I tried to save these babies, gave them a nice cut that will enable them to get as much water into their stems and dive them into a tiny bottle with water.

As advised by other garden growers, I should keep a fresh set of water everyday for these babies. And guess what? After a few days, the leaves perked up, they were recovering! Hooray!

 

 

After a few days, about 5-8 days, some roots started showing. I let it sit for a couple of days more for it to grow as much root system as it can, but knowing me, excited as I was, I finally decided to plant these in soil.

They grew and became lengthy quite fast, specially those that stayed indoors, perhaps because it is trying to reach the source of light as high as it can, thus growing a lengthy stem. I trim them once in a while when the stems became really long, and grow those cuttings to grow roots again.

Here they are now, lengthy and a bit bushy. This is just one pot with 2 cuttings in it. I still have 3-4 of these sitting outside. Some did not make it, but good thing I made as much cuttings to root as possible to multiply these quickly.

And here they are now, a glass of refreshingly chilled mint drink, perfect for this hot weather for me to enjoy 😀

Start your garden now and reap the benefits soon enough. Hello summer!