More shoots, and leaves too!

It's been about another week, and there are three more shoots, and the first one has leaves now. The new shoots are both Baobabs as far as I can tell, and two are in the same pot as the first shoot, but surprise surprise, the other one has germinated outside of the propagator.

When I planted the seeds I ended up with ten pots in all, only eight of which would fit in the propagator, so I left two just out on the windowsill to see how they'd get on. This new shoot is also from the batch that was soaked for the longest; that is about 24 hours. So I wasn't necessarily expecting one of them to have germinated so soon, if at all - especially seen as the building certainly isn't over heated. Perhaps the heat from the sun in the past week has been enough to keep the soil temperature suitably high.

It's also really interesting seeing the first leaves of the Baobab shoot, which are called cotyledons. The cotyledons are not 'true' leaves, but are formed from part of the seed of the plant. This means that they often look quite different from the leaves that develop afterwards, and can cause havoc in pots and gardens when it comes to identifying intended seedlings and weed seedlings, and knowing which to remove! The Baobab shoot has two of these 'leaves', each about the sixe of a two pence piece, which means they are called dicotyledenous.

Still no news on the Neem seeds then, but really good progress with the Boababs; good to be seeing leaves, and watching how they're developing. It is certainly a learning curve, a return to basic biology, and after the last two weeks I'm expecting big things over the next one!