Growing Celery from a Store Bought Bunch

There has been so much on Pinterest with growing your own produce from store bought produce that I have been starting some on my own to show what happens for me.

Here is the end of some celery I bought at the store and put into water on 9-6.  This picture was taken on 9-13.

On 9-16 I planted it in soil to see what would happen.  There are no roots. The lettuce core I put into water turned soggy while I was out of town (see August 5, 2014 post) for two weeks.  I didn't want the same to happen to the celery.  We will see if it roots.
NOTE: As of 10-6-14 there are no roots.  The original celery piece is drying up. It lifted out of the pot since it was smaller than it was originally.  There was an air pocket between the celery and soil.  I pushed it a little deeper into the soil and moved the soil next to the celery too.

Moonflower

I cut the huge Moonflower plant down to just a couple of branches this Summer.  I is back to being huge again.  Here are some pictures.

I took this picture with with the flash and the front porch light on. That is the tomato plant on the left that is talked about in the previous post.

This is with the front porch light on, but the flash is off.  This is more like what you see when you walk outside at night with just the porch light on.

One last picture with the porch light off and the flash on.  The middle picture is my favorite.

Tomato Horned Worms

Do you know what this moth is?

This moth that was at my front door on 8-8-14.  It is what a tomato horned worm turns into.  This moth stayed here for about a day or a day and a half.

Here is the picture that Hubby took.

Here is an even closer view that he took.

This morning I went outside and this is want I saw on the ground.

Here is a close-up.  I sent these pictures to my husband and asked him if he thought it was from the squirrels.  It is much smaller than what I see in the backyard, but I didn't know what else had left it.

We started talking about the droppings in the front yard again.  Hubby forgot to look when he got home from work.  He went outside to look and found more that was green.  He started looking closely at the plant:

This is what he found.  These are the first tomato horned worms I have seen at my house.  After realizing what the dropping on the ground were I think I saw the same droppings 4 or 5 years ago.

Oh look another one.

Now there are three.

A close look at the plant shows the leaves are gone.

Several branches have all the leaves stripped off.

He put them in the center of the cul-de-sac to see what they would do.

I am at one side of the cul-de-sac and I zoomed in a little.  I can see them wandering around, but the camera didn't show them without zooming in some.  We watched them for about 10 minutes and they seemed to be pacing around in circles and back and forth.  The grandkids got here about 40 minutes later and we went outside right away so the kids could see them.  We couldn't find them anywhere.

Here is the only tomato they were feasting on.  While looking for another tomato that may have been eaten I found:

This little guy.  It looks like a baby Grasshopper.  I was hoping it was a Praying Mantis, but I couldn't tell until I got a look at the picture.  It kept running down the plant and we tried to get a picture.

Here is an overhead view of the tomato plants.

See the lost Hydrangea in the center?  This is what can happen when you plant in compost that has uncooked tomato seeds in it.  Tomato seeds are hard to kill in compost.  It doesn't get hot enough usually.  The seeds will germinate when they get a good amount of water.  I left them growing just to see what they would look like.  I don't know if they came from store bought tomatoes or home grown tomatoes last year.