New hobby: Gardening

Yupe, I now officially declare gardening as my latest hobby! :P

It all started after my mom gave me 2 pots of moss roses. Seeing all those colourful blooms daily really made my day. Both QianNing and QianHui were ecstatic everytime I brought them out to look at the flowers. I can't believe that we've been staying in this home for 4 years now and never ever thought of planting some flowers!

A few weeks back, as we were shopping at a hypermarket I bought myself a packet of aster seeds. The seeds sprouted just a few days after I planted them. The sense of satisfaction was huge. And I thought why not plant more of these stuffs, and I'll have a colourful front porch all year round!

17 days old aster (not sure which species though)
So I googled to see if I can get my hands on some other flower seeds online and guess what, I stumbled onto this wonderful site: http://iris33.blogspot.com/

I ordered 6 packets of seeds and received them in 4 days.

Canterbury Bell, Dianthus deltoides Arctic Fire, Five Spot, Zinnia Pompon, Balsam Camellia and Cosmos Bipinnatus "White Psycho" seeds. The packaging came with short instructions on how to plant the seeds. The detailed planting instructions can be found on her website.
It's been almost a week now since I planted some of the seeds and I'm truly excited because most of them have sprouted! ^_^

5 days old Zinnia Pompom (not sure why only 1 sprout as I planted quite a number of seeds... keeping my fingers crossed that the rest will show up soon)

5 days old Balsam Camellia
And the greatest excitement is this tiny little sprout from the Canterbury Bell seeds! This plant is not for beginners like me but I really like the flowers and so I decided to give it a try. I was supposed to treat the seeds with stratification but I wasn't too sure how to do it correctly. I decided to germinate half of the seeds the normal way ie. just water and soil with normal temperature. And the remaining half, I stored with damp paper towel + soil in my fridge. The funny thing is that, the ones I planted without stratification sprouted first! Well probably I did the stratification the wrong way... anyway, it's still great to see the Canterbury Bell sprouts. The next challenge is to wait for 1 year for the first blooms (that's what the online articles say anyway)...

7 days old Canterbury Bell (see the sprout on the right of the pink dot)