by Janet Jenson

Created on: October 09, 2008

Growing flowering plants for the first time in an AeroGarden indoors was a summer project for me, so when we got back to our winter home, we really looked forward to an entire growing season. It was delightful to see all the seed packets in the sale bin at a local store and try to decide which ones would grow fastest and give the best results. We had good experiences already growing marigolds and Sweet Williams dirt-free in the liquid nutrient solution, so what next? A local store helped out by putting their seeds packets on sale ten for a dollar, so I bought one each of everything they had.

The label on a ten-cent packet of Forget-Me-Nots did not give very much information, but the name is so beguiling and the promise of being a fast-growing plant encouraged me to include it in my first experiment.

The Forget-Me-Not seemed to be taking forever to germinate compared to the other seeds we tried, and when a few green sprigs finally poked their heads out of the synthetic foam plug that came with AeroGrow's Master Gardener Kit, they turned out to belong to just one solitary seedling. After three weeks still nothing more than primary leaves showed and the plant just did not seem to be getting any bigger. In fact, all of the plants around it were getting huge and so I took that one out of the Deluxe AeroGarden and put in one of our older planters, an AeroGarden 3) and pretty much stopped paying any attention to it at all, except to drop nutrients in whenever the warning light came on. A bit short of two months later, though, we found that our Forget-Me-Nots had not forgotten us even though we had pretty much forgotten about them. Seeing a huge clump of buds in the center of the plant sent me running to do something we should have done in the beginning. I looked online for information about this plant. Shade-loving? Wow! It blossomed under those bright grow lights! Requires darkness to germinate? That may explain why it took so long, as we were timing the grow lights to our own night owl habits so the seeds were going to sleep around two in the morning and then being yanked back into awareness at dawn. Lettuce and basil and some of the other greens we love to grow in our AeroGardens like that, but apparently the Forget-Me-Nots would have liked a bit more shut-eye. No matter, they eventually adapted to our lifestyle.

Moving flowering plants from the AeroGarden to another dirt-free growing environment is a cinch. No hardening-off required! I just pulled the grow plug out of the grow hole, set in in a container of Hydroton rocks and put that beautiful Forget-Me-Not in the partial shade of our porch. What will we do differently next year? Grow lots more of them!

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