Green Thumb, Part II

I have not had the best of luck with plants. I got a couple lovely house plants from a woman in the ward when Bentley was a baby. This lady carefully explained to me that, due to the stress in her home over she and her husband's divorce, the plants were suffering. This immediately caused me to worry that if the plants didn't do well, it would be because I was stressing them out. Talk about pressure. One plant was an ivy, and it proceeded to grow all over my bay window, attaching little nubs into the walls. As I began to have visions of Audrey II, I became more and more creeped out by it. I think I threw it away when we moved.

The other plant was a beautiful tall thing with strong fronds, but it was very big so I stuck it outside for a few days while I tried to decide where to put it. Bad idea. All those beautiful fronds promptly turned yellow and fell off. Oops. This plant proved to be quite hardy, though, and it sprouted new leaves and managed to thrive. Until Bentley got old enough to enjoy grabbing fistfuls of dirt from its pot and throwing them onto the carpet. Nothing I did persuaded Bentley to stop doing this, and I finally decided that I could not keep both the plant and my sanity. So the plant went to live with the Goodfellows. (I have no idea how it's doing now. Sister Goodfellow was worried that her cats might destroy it, but I told her if I didn't find a home for it soon, I was going to simply chuck it into the woods behind my house so I could stop vacuuming and screaming at my child. So either way, the plant would be doomed. Sister Goodfellow decided to risk it.)

Then of course there was the debacle of the orchid that my sweet neighbor gave me. I don't know what I did wrong, but I killed it. And it was very sad. It had been so pretty!

Now, some of you may not know this, but one of the things that really excited me when we bought our house was the prospect of having a yard that was big enough for a garden. My Grandpa used to spend a lot of his time gardening, and going outside to pick produce with him was always a delight. Wouldn't it be great-- not to mention cheap and yummy-- if I could grow fresh tomatoes all by myself? (This was never a possibility in my home growing up. We lived out in the woods where there was hardly any sunshine for growing anything other than rhododendrons (the Washington State flower, in case you didn't know!). The few things we did try to plant in a patch of sunlight quickly got eaten by the monster slugs that also reside in Washington state.

So gardening is something that I have happy memories of, but don't actually have a clue as to how to go about doing. (<--- Long, weird sentence. Sorry. Good luck interpreting that. Sorry to any former English teachers out there...) And it turns out that I am not someone to jump into the great unknown. I really like someone to hold my hand when I'm trying anything new. (Maybe this is why I'm not crafty?) And so then, being the natural procrastinator that I am, I just never got around to doing it this season. Oh, well, I thought to myself, maybe next year I'll plant a garden.

End of story.

Until. I saw on my friend Anna's blog that she had planted a garden. I was very impressed. Someone who actually DOES those things that I mean to do! And I left a comment on her blog telling her so. And she (kind soul that she is) emailed me back and said she had some extra seedlings if I wanted them.

Well, I couldn't turn down an offer like that. So I picked them up the next day and began trying to dig out a spot in our yard full of weeds and who-knows-what that might accommodate a garden. It took two days and a lot of work on Craig's part, but we finally got the ground ready and I happily planted all the seedlings. As I knelt on the ground with my little shovel and my baby plants, I told Craig that I was quite enjoying gardening. Craig was quick to point out that that was probably because he and Anna had done all the real work for me. Yeah, well.

But I did it. I tried something new, and that makes me happy. And so I'm not worrying about the fact that I probably did the planting all wrong. I'm pretty sure they're haphazard and too close together, I know the various plants are all mixed up, and I probably didn't do the best job of getting all the old roots out of the soil. But despite all that, my garden is growing!!! And that makes me happy. So here are some pictures to prove it (and of course a couple pics of the kids):

My garden is the stuff on the right. Everything on the left just happened to be there already. But I do like the roses!

Bentley likes to water the garden. Craig is hoping he'll be a firefighter some day.

Kendra's hair looks really bad when she pulls it out of its ponytail...

I didn't plant these strawberries, but aren't they cute? Bentley tried one today and didn't like it...

One more shot of the roses. (Try not to notice the green chain-link fence behind them.)

And one final shot of the actual garden. Mixed in there are tomato, squash, and watermelon plants (according to Anna; I can't think of why she would lie...). Not bad, eh?