Home Garden Update - Alfalfa in Bloom

Regular readers of this blog may remember the earlier post regarding home gardening. For the past several years I have grown container gardens. This year I decided to experiment with some plants I had never grown before. These were yellow onions, cilantro, alfalfa, and romaine lettuce. I tried lavender last year but none of them germinated, so I tried again this year. I sprouted the lavender in some paper towels so I could see if they germinated. Once they sprouted, I moved them to potting soil.

My cilantro and lavender seeds germinated and produced some 1/4" shoots, but for whatever unknown reason these withered and died after about 3 weeks. I kept them watered and in what I thought was the right amount of sunlight. Same with the romaine lettuce - fortunately there is time to try that again before the cold season. I might try broccoli as well.

One of the items I had planted, mainly as an experiment, was a few alfalfa seeds. I did these in a small sweater box. They germinated and produced the plants seen in the picture above. I thought the blue flowers were cool and might be of interest to anyone who, like myself, had never grown alfalfa before. The plants appear "stretched". I think they probably need more sunlight then they get. This is problematic where I am located - due to the site geometry the plants are in shade most of the day. I may simply be unable to get decent results with certain crops due to the lack of direct sun.