Surprise bloom

All this time I've spent talking about my tomato plants and I haven't really mentioned the citronella plants I purchased on the same sight-seeing trip I took to Anderson's for this blog post. While there I bought two tubs of citronella plants for $9.99 each. Yes it is that citronella and no they don't really work to keep the mosquitoes at bay as just plants. They do smell lovely though and if you take rub a crushed leaf on your skin it does seem to help a bit. This year we've been pretty blighted with mosquitoes, so every little bit helps.

Anyway, citronella is actually a citrus-scented geranium, so they do bloom. My mumsy-in-law grows them and said that in five years she hadn't seen a single bloom. But this year, her mother accidentally triggered the blooms by forgetting to water them for a few weeks. Turns out that not watering a blooming plant tends to do the trigger a survival instinct that pops out flowers to start the reproduction cycle:

Though some of my plant has turned yellow and brown, it has some gorgeous blooms on it now!