Some of my tororo-aoi plants are already producing flowers, about 3 weeks after transplanting into the garden. The flowers don’t last long so I don’t have a photo of one in full bloom yet, but in one of the photos you can see the dropped blossom with the young seed pod on the plant.
These flowers are all on the four of the plants that are by far outgrowing the others, and I believe these are the ones sprouted from the old seeds I had purchased from Richter’s. All the plants are the same species, but I expect it comes in different varietals (just as tomato plants come in different varietals to produce different tomatoes), and this particular one is bred for big plants with showy flowers. The other seeds would be bred to produce larger roots, since that is the part used for making neri.
Once the smaller plants start to produce flowers and pods, I’ll leave all the flowers to coexist for a while, then I’ll start removing the flower buds from these larger plants. As a result I should get large-plant seeds from the early pods on the large plants, small-plant seeds from the later pods on the small plants, and various hybrids from the pods produced when all plants were in bloom.
I may also start trimming back some of the large plants so I can see in the fall if this makes them produce larger roots.
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