hello all.
i stumbled onto this forum while looking for information about my hyacinth beans. now i'm a member, so i'll introduce myself. i'm 29, i'm from the states, but i've been living in south korea for almost five years now. i teach english at kimpo college, where they provide my wife and i with an apartment which has giant south-facing windows on the indoor balcony.
two years ago, a student of mine at the previous school i taught at gave me a going away present. it was a little novelty item called a 'message bean'. someone had branded the words "i love you" onto a hyacinth seed, and put it into a can of dirt and on a shelf. when it sprouts, it's supposed to say "i love you". mine broke, so it only said "i lov", but it quickly overcame that hurdle, and it grew and grew until it's meager can was no longer a suitable home for it. i transplanted it into a large plastic tub and kept it watered, and it continued to grow, then flower, then let loose with some enormous pods. you can see those here:

yes, that's nearly a foot long.
anyway, i soon got the gardening bug, and-without knowing thing one about gardening-i planted whatever seeds i could get my hands on. i gutted some cherry tomatoes, a kiwi, and some other things, and my balcony was soon a small rainforest (minus the rain):

this year i'm planning to keep it a little more simple. last week i planted all 23 seeds that i got from my first bean, and i'm still waiting for them to sprout. i also planted two avocado seeds just because a friend of mine visited last week and made some guacamole. i don't know much about avacados, but then hey, i didn't know much about hyacinths last year either.
anyway... that's a brief history of how i came to wind up in your forum. i'm afraid i'll be rather parasitic as far as information goes, as there's a lot i require and very little i can provide. but hopefully in a couple of weeks i'll be able to provide you with some nice pictures of my beans instead... if they aren't currently rotting away in the dirt.

That is an awesome space you have made in your home! Welcome to the Forum!

Holy Cowwwwww!!!
That stuff looks great!!!
*We have another indoor gardener that does some of the same thing you do.. His handle name is...
Noneofyourbusiness..I bet you two will have alot in common...*

Welllllllllllcome to The Garden Helper's Forum,
we are very glad you found us...

We do have some questions from time to time from other new indoor gardeners...
Hope you'll be able to help along those lines...
You've got some great looking plants there...
*thanks for the pictures by the way, we love those around here*

I cannnnnnnnnnnnn nottttttttt believe the size of that bean!!!

is his name actually "noneofyourbusiness"? or are you taunting me?

No, it's not actually that,
but his sign in name is that...
Just like yours is endoftheworld...

I would never taunt you...*scouts honor*

He does alot of gardening in doors..
I will PM him and see if he's around..
*he just had a wee~one a couple of months ago, and is a tad busy these days...
but stops thru every so often...

Do you only have the cherry tomato variety growing, or other kinds as well???

Well, you've certainly come to the right place! Many of us started out knowing little or nothing about gardening, or about specific plants, & the people here simply love sharing what they know! This is my first year at flower gardening & my thumb is getting greener & greener all the time. As I try some of the things I've learned here, I can even answer questions now! I was an English major & am a teacher, working with 1st - 5th graders at a parochial school, in Language arts. (My title is "retired", but only because I'm trying to give it up... old habits die hard when you love what you're doing!!)

(I'm almost sure that your Mother didn't name you "endofthewor1d" ... what's your name? I'm sure that other people would like to know too, & if you want to, you can put it in the "Signature" box on your profile page so it will appear at the bottom of your posts.)

Thanks for sharing your pictures with us! That bean is really impressive! I googled it & found where it can be purchased, but there doesn't seem to be any botanical information on it there! Do you know if it has another name, or know the botanical name for it?

i was only joking. i looked him up.
that was my garden from last year. it's all been chopped down since then. the cherry tomatoes started growing white splotchy patches. i figured it was some kind of fungus or something and might threaten my beloved bean. so i chopped them all down. to tell you the truth, i didn't have very strong feelings for them anyway. i'm not much of a vegetable person. i was just curious as to how easy it was to grow seeds from right out of the fruit. i found out it is actually very easy. the tomatoes were out of control though. correct me if i'm wrong, but tomato plants don't keep going throughout the year, do they?
for my indoor garden, i'm pretty much only interested in plants that are going to stick around through the thick and thin. my bean would have made it, but the wife and i took a five week vacation to the states for christmas/new year, and we didn't have anyone to water it.
as for your question about the tomatoes, yes, they were mostly cherry tomatoes. i also dumped a regular tomato's worth of seeds into a cut-in-half coke bottle full of soil. those grew too, but as there were about fifty plants competing for half a coke bottle's worth of soil, they didn't make it too long.
as i mentioned before, i didn't really know anything about gardening when i started this project last year. and from what little i've read since then, it seems that i've done just about everything wrong. over-watering, planting hyacinths in plastic tubs with no drainage at all, etc...
despite my horticultural shortcomings, my bean plant thrived, and i'm expecting no less from its offspring this year.

thank you patty s, for your warm welcome.
my name is bob. but i prefer to stick to endofthewor1d when in internet forums. i like the drama of it.
teaching english in korea was exciting for a few years. since i got married, it's changed from being exciting to quietly comfortable. not once in my boozing sex-hound days of not too long ago do i ever recall thinking 'today is a good day to start a garden'. oh my, i suddenly sound so old.
from what i've found on the internet, my bean's botanical name is Lablab purpureus. here is a link:
http://home.att.net/~larvalbugbio/hyacinthbean.html
i looked around the internet and it seems that my bean is rather uncommon in that its leaves and pods are bright green, and the flowers are white. usually the pods and flowers are purple, and the leaves have purple veins.

Hi endoftheworld
Welcome to the forum
Nice to meet you.

Hello End!

Welcome!

I was just wondering about the writting. It is initially on the hyacinth seed...so where does it show on the plant when it grows?

That is the coolest thing I've heard of this morning *so far! LOL!

Hi endoftheworld!

Welcome to the forum! You're going to love

Have a beautiful day!

the writing appears on the bean istelf when it first sprouts out of the ground. just pops its head up, and you've got a couple of days of "i love you" before that withers away and the vine takes off in a growing frenzy.

hi there,

welcome to the forum and nice to meet you

Hello and WELCOME!!

That's an AMAZING garden you have there! I wish I had natural light like that comming in! All I have is a basement, but I manage! lol

I too started with veggies, nothing but, just to see how stuff grows. I've now switched to cactus', and am still intrigued (and confused) by them. I've also switched my entire outdoor garden to flowers this year (from all veggies). I've never really tried it, until last year.

Anyways..............
Nice to have you here! Hope to hear more and see more pics!!

wow! hi there noneofyourbusiness, AKA: the-one-who-was-referred-to.
i opted for veggies, not so much because i like veggies, but because i like fast-growing, viny plants. last year's bean plant was really nice, but it couldn't do the job of livening up my apartment all by itself. the cherry tomatoes sure did though.
i should have enough beans this year so that they can do the job by themselves this time, obviating the need for me to grow tomatoes.

i've got some good news...
my two avocados have sprouted! here's a picture of one of them:

the other one looks pretty much the same.

still no word from the beans. all in good time, i suppose.
the day before yesterday, i made some lemonade and, suddenly finding myself with a bunch of lemon seeds, poked them into some dirt. anyone know anything about growing citrus trees indoors?
thanks.

Hi and Welcome aboard,
I have a egg that has a plant and a sign that is
to grow out with I love you too, just started mind.
Hope it grow,s bettyboop1948

false alarm on that avocado thing. i discovered my mistake when a third, and then a fourth, plant sprouted. i only planted two seeds, so these must be from something left over in the dirt from last season. i'm thinking tomatoes. i really don't want anymore tomato plants this year. they might just meet an untimely death.

I was kinda wondering about that one. The avocado will come up a lot more slowly. Mine took almost 2 months to sprout in water but once the stems finally came out, they are growing very quickly now and are both getting close to a foot tall.