Strange Addiction

I've got a problem.  With buying basil plants.

At some point after I began cooking real food, I wandered into a Trader Joe's and they had these LOVELY basil plants for less than what it costs to buy fresh basil leaves at my regular grocery store!  That was a no brainer: I scooped one off the shelf, absolutely delighted with my find.  I used the fresh, fragrant leaves a couple times while cooking, so I felt more than justified with my purchase. 

And then one day, I noticed that the leaves on my basil plant didn't look so good.  They were turning brown and spotty, like something was eating them.  Before long, the entire plant was dead.  I threw it away and bought another.  And the same thing happened.

By the time I got to my 5rd or 6th basil plant, I googled what was going on.  Google seemed to think some tiny bugs were eating my plant and the way to fix that was to remove all the damaged leaves.  That just left my poor plant looking even sorrier.  And whatever was eating it just went for the rest of the leaves.  It died within days of my "pruning" it.

I thought maybe it was time I gave up on buying these plants since all I ever seemed to do was kill them (sometimes even without getting around to cooking with them!), but then I had one day where my regular grocery store didn't have any basil and Wegman's only had live plants, so I carefully picked out another one, only to have the entire thing practically fall over the second I got it home and removed the plastic wrap that had apparently been holding it up!

Craig came home that day and saw my sad plant and said, "Not another one!" and I had to protest, "THIS TIME IT'S NOT MY FAULT!"

But this little plant has proved much heartier than the others!  Despite the fact that its kind of growing sideways, it didn't just die!  And when we left for a week in April (and again in July) and it didn't get any water or sunlight and basically turned yellow, it revived again when we returned home and I got back to watering it and opened the blinds so it could see the sun again!

So that's been nice.  It's a sad ugly little plant, truth be told, but I've kept it alive for quite some time now and I'm quite pleased with it.  I've only bought one more basil plant since then.  To keep it company, obviously.



I actually have one other plant-- a hanging flower basket on my front porch-- that my mother bought me when she was here in May.  This one was doing fine until a little wren built this messy, mossy nest under its leaves.  Then, every time I'd try to water my plant, the wren would shoot out of the basket, giving me the stink eye on her way out.  So naturally I felt so guilty that I stopped watering the darn thing at all.  After two weeks of neglect, I came back from Florida to a VERY dead-looking plant.  I gave it a healthy watering just in case, AND IT CAME BACK, TOO!  And the wren seems to have moved on, so I can water guilt-free again. 

It's probably too soon to start feeling proud of my green thumb, huh?