Just got a greenhouse for my plants! It’s pretty small, but big enough for me to stand in and definitely enough room to accommodate all my plants and more. I was able to get some stevia seeds to germinate while still in my apartment at UMaine and now the plants have really taken off, along with some lemon balm, which smells just like lemons if you touch it! I use stevia exclusively to sweeten my tea and I drink a lot of tea. Pepsi Co. and Coca-Cola have been releasing some drinks with stevia in them, such as the SoBe Life Water and Zero-Calorie Vitamin Water. There are at least 4 brands of stevia currently on the market: Stevia in the Raw (which I buy), PureVia (Pepsi Co.), Truvia (Coca-Cola), and Sun Crystals (McNeil Nutritionals). The sweetener comes directly from the stevia leaf and so it’s completely natural. Some studies have shown that it may actively stave off diabetes. It has been used for centuries in South America and for several decades in Japan, with no side effects.
My Beallara orchid just bloomed again. I have posted a photo of it in my Flickr account, along with a photo of my stevia and lemon balm plants and my greenhouse, with me in it, lol. I just got some Lovage and Belladonna seeds. I’ve been wanting to grow Belladonna because it is a major novelty plant with some interesting attributes, such as deep black berries and purple leaves. If you’ve seen Practical Magic, you’ll know it’s considered to have magical properties and is very toxic – you may recall from the movie that Jillian uses small amounts to put her boyfriend to sleep, later killing him with it by accident. In fact, every part of the plant is extremely poisonous. But I think it will be a challenge to grow. It requires cold stratification to get it to germinate, so I will need at least a month in the fridge before I can plant them in soil. The number of plant species I have growing is only surpassed by the number of animal pets my little sister has, haha!