The last month was mostly all about truly winding down the gardening season. Harvesting the remainder of the garden, cleaning up beds, dumping containers into my hügelkultur beds and overwintering peppers. I also wrapped up my apple grafting class and prepared my trees for the winter.
At the start of the month, I didn't really think that I'd be starting a new 'gardening' project before January at the earliest. That quickly changed when a situation presented itself after a conversation about whether new cacti grow from seeds or via other means.
I've 'grown' cacti before, but the thought
never really crossed my mind to grow them from the very beginning of their lifecycle. Honestly, they've often posed a problem for me to grow them. I over water them, or let them get too cold, or maybe it's lack of light? I'm not really sure, but in general they don't seem to do well with me. All of this being said, I aspire to do better.
Despite how
fussy they can be to keep alive, cacti look so cool! There are so many variants. Ever since I started researching improving my indoor air quality, I've wanted to get more. This is because of something I noted... many indoor plants seem to
produce CO2 at night instead of the oxygen that I wanted to be filling my bedroom. This is not the case for most succulents which actually do the opposite.
Many of the greatest looking cacti tend to be expensive to purchase. So I decided that a good idea to test a large number of varieties for their oxygenation potential would be to just grow them from seed.
So, that's exactly what I decided to do!
I setup a small cactus growing station inside that I can check on every day. Right now I have ~50 seeds of 5 different varieties germinating in a heated tent in my living room. Have you grown cacti from seed before? Have any tips on growing them? Let me know!
I also participated in a study using a night time Cannabigerol (CBG) tincture. CBG is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid found in cannabis. The results of this study haven't been finalized yet, but I can say that I noticed an increase in deep sleep time and a reduction in wakeups while taking it. My HRV was also consistently higher during the study (possibly related to the positive sleep impact, and/or the CBG?). I'm going to let this wash out for a few weeks and then try the product again and see if my results are consistent.
As I'm writing this, I'm
on day 3 of Prolon's Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD). I've done prolonged fasts before and it always ends up dramatically reducing my muscle mass. The FMD has been clinically proven to provide the benefits of a water fast while preserving lean body mass.
I've wanted to try it for awhile and decided that this was the perfect time to do so. Prolon insists that you take nothing that isn't provided "in the box", so I've also stopped all supplements and caffeine this week as well. Only 2 more full days to go! Have you done Prolon or another form of prolonged fasting before? I'm curious about your experiences.
