Indoor Plants & Gardening DIY Projects – avocado, lemon and rose
Indoor Plants & Gardening DIY Projects
Growing avocados, lemons and roses at home
Plants bring a sense of calm and cosiness into any apartment or home. Most need just a small space and sunlight, some can survive even in darker places such as bathrooms or hallways. Having nature indoors will help you create beautiful sanctuary and offer different fun and creative DIY projects you can enjoy! Grow your skills, grow your garden, be practical and re-grow vegetables. There is nothing like cooking from your own homegrown ingredients, infusing delicious homemade cocktails infused with your own herbs! Umm, the Kir Royale!
For this project I’ve chosen three great indoor gardening DIY projects. Inspiring and so easy to make! Enjoy the creative project and watch the magic happen!
- how to grow avocado from a seed
- growing a lemon tree from a seed
- growing rose cuts in a potato
Growing avocado from the seed
I am a big fan of avocados. They are amazing to use for many healthy recipes, creative natural dyeing crafts or even just to draw! Avocado is very beautiful aesthetically because it is happy to grow in water, no soil. The stem with elegant long leaves sunk in a large glass container can become a beautiful and sophisticated decor idea for bohemian or minimalistic interior. So let’s get on with the project!
What you’ll need:
- one ripe avocado (try to choose more of a mushy one because these are closer to the end of their use and so more ready to turn the seed inside into a new plant)
- three toothpicks
- a container (ideally transparent so you can see the progress of the seed and also check the quality of the water)
Instructions:
Cut the avocado in half making sure you don’t reach and cut the seed, only the flesh and skin. Once that’s done, rotate the halves each in one direction (clock and anti-clock) to separate 
them. One will be with and one without the seed.
Gently scoop the seed out and wash it to remove any residue bits of the avocado flesh. Then use a fingernail to gently peel off the skin covering the seed itself. After doing a bit of research I found out that the skin has no particular benefit for growing the plant. In fact it simply sits on top of the seed creating a crust so it’s most probably best removed. That’s according to the most successful gardeners anyway!
Once the skin is peeled off you can see two or three lines (cracks nearly) going from the top to the bottom of the seed where it was attached to the branch.
Take two or three toothpicks and put them into the seed equal distances from each other. Make sure that you DO NOT place them in these lines and that they are placed in at 45 to 60 degree angle. This is important to allow the seed to sit nicely in the water-filled container without having to overfill it with water.
Once the toothpicks are in place put the seed into a container and fill with clear water till about 3/4 of it sits in.
Now give it about 8 weeks or so to start seeing the root breaking through the bottom of the seed! Once the root grows out the plant soon follows from a crack at the top! Be very gentle when changing the water (I do once a week right now) and manipulating with the root, it is very fragile.
Indoor lemon tree from the seed
Lemons lemons lemons! The cent of citruses instantly brings on a sense of fresh summer or winter mulled wine! Lemons are delicious to use in many recipes (try the DELICIOUS Lemon Posset recipe with us!) and like with the avocado tree, lemon tree makes just as beautiful plant for home decor! Lemons are also known for natural antibacterial, stain-removing or odour-eliminating properties. It makes them very useful just as they are delicious!
What you’ll need:
- one lemon (some say the Meyer kind is best for growing an indoor miniature lemon trees. To be honest I just grabbed the kind they had in the store!)
- several tbl spoons of a garden soil (I used one with natural fertilizer)
- a container
Instructions:
Take a lemon, cut it in half and take out the seeds in the middle. Some suggest to clean them, some to simply suck on the seeds to remove any flesh. Either way just do make sure they are clean but remain moist.
Choose those that seem ‘juicy’ – full and healthy with a decent shape, and put them into the container filled with soil, about a half an inch deep.
Cover the seeds with a bit of extra soil and water with about two/three tbl spoons of water. I’ve read you can cover the pot with a cling film to create the green house effect, however I skipped this given that my balcony is the way it is.
It can take about 2 months for the seeds to grow so do water them regularly, do not over water. I think it took me nearly 3 for the seeds to wake up so growing a lemon tree in a cooler climate is definitely a long term game!
Growing a rose cut in a potato
This really is super simple! Another way to preserve the beauty of roses. I have previously written an article on Homemade Rose Body Scrub. 
as a way of keeping those beautiful roses I had in the vase and felt sad to get rid of. You can use rose plants to create soothing plant oasis in your home, or as cut flowers in a vase. You can use them fresh in a salad or for baking – try our Homemade Flower Biscuits! Or you can use them fresh or dried for homemade beauty products.
Recently I bought a rose miniature and one of the branches came off. I don’t want to blame my princess cat without witnessing but ermm… we all know the branch didn’t just fall off on it’s own, right? Nor did the teeth marks appear on the plant out of nowhere, ermm ermm!
Anyway! I wanted to keep the rose so I researched how to best preserve (regrow) a rose cut. At first I thought it should be put in the water but then I came across a fantastic technique – growing rose cuts in a potato!
It’s amazingly clever because the potato keeps the moisture inside allowing the cut branch to grow some roots. Plus the potato itself is perfectly natural and degradable so no need to worry about it once it’s inside the soil!
What you’ll need:
- a rose cut
- one medium potato
- some garden soil substrate
- a container
Instructions:
Take a potato and make a 1-2inch deep hole with a toothpick.
Remove excess leaves, blossoms and buds off the rose cut to allow the plant to primarily ‘invest’ it’s growing efforts in the roots.
Place the rose cut into the potato and put inside a container half filled with soil. Cover with more soil till about an inch under the edge of the container.
Water with three/four tbl spoons of water and place the rose in a warm and sunny place.
