Contest Steem Plants Week 1 - A Lantern Story

Hello everyone. This is Week 1 of this exciting contest, the Steem Plants Contest now hosted by @strawberrry. Remember, that's like strawberry but with three letter "r" before the "y" as in "berrry." This is a continuation of the Steem Plants Challenge formerly initiated by @knopka145, then picked up by @steemit.contest, and now by @strawberrry. Lots of thanks to our host for continuing this awesome contest. Check out the contest post here to know more about it. Join us and have fun!

For this week I would like to feature a plant my wife bought from a sidewalk plant vendor a few years ago. She actually bought two of these.

My wife told me these were Chinese Lantern plants. What a very descriptive name. They do look like lanterns. Colorful ones at that. I looked them up in the internet and found out that there are other names for these such as Japanese-lantern, Bladder Cherry, Ground Cherry, Winter Cherry, and even Strawberry. The plant's specie is called Physalis Alkekengi in the family Solanaceae. This species is native to South Asia and Northeast Asia, aside from other regions covering Southern Europe.

Unfortunately these plants did not survive. They started to wither after a few weeks and all our attempts to revive it failed. We researched the internet on how to take care of them but somehow they did not respond to the treatment and the recommended care. Perhaps other factors were not addressed such as the multitude of plants in the area, or the presence of fungus and insects that prefer this plant. Whatever. Funny thing though is we never saw the roadside vendor again nor have we seen another Chinese Lantern plant for sale since. My wife wants to try growing this specie again as I imagine a garden full of this kind of flower will certainly be a colorful and bright one. Maybe we will try the internet and buy there although the seedlings are quite expensive. Like 6 times the price we bought the plants for from the vendor.

All for now. If we do find and start to grow this Chinese Lantern plant I will surely make another post about it. Meanwhile, good luck to all the participants. May you all be safe and may peace follow you wherever you are.

(All photos are mine.)