I come from a long line of gardeners. My grandmother could revive the deadest of plants by just looking at it. My mom has a green thumb that produced hundreds of zucchinis, tomatoes and cucumbers that were offloaded onto all my friends in high school. (She’s since scaled back since she no longer has teenagers who can’t say no to her at her fingertips.) My other grandma always had pretty flowers growing all over her house.
And then there’s me. At the age of about five, my mother and all her wishful thinking gave me that gardening sign up there. There’s many a picture of me as a toddler running naked through her vegetable gardens so she had this wild idea that combined with my love of naked frolicking amongst squash and my very green genes, I would someday become a gardener.
I think she was greatly disappointed the day I killed my first cactus. I have the very opposite affect on plants that my Grandma Irma did: I look at plants and they die. Considering how many plants in college wound up on her doorstep after I’d killed them, that’s a fair assessment. Miraculously, one spring break week later they’d be thriving and bigger than before.
When I moved into my current apartment a year ago I decided I needed to have plants. After all, I had a gorgeous deck, backyard and ALL THIS SUN! There was no way I could kill plants with that much light.
Oh, hi Ashley, you live in Colorado. It is very dry. And you always forget to water your plants. But I still tried with two tomato plants and as many flowers as I could find. I somehow only killed a few unlucky little green things (cilantro, dill, basil–twice, rosemary, lavender and several flowers–so maybe not just a few) but I still called the whole thing a success. I did not count my suicidal tomato plant that nose dived off my back porch and down the stairs. It did that on it’s own accord and was quite lush and tomato-fruit-bearing-y prior to it’s jump.
This year I decided to once again try out this whole gardening thing. This time I employed my mother while she was in town for my birthday to help me pick out flowers. She had some valuable advice like, don’t pick out flowers with yellowing leaves. Simple. One could even say obvious but somehow I got one past her and I knew at that moment that I still have a long ways to go before I’m going to be any good at this. It took me a couple weeks to plant them but I finally have everything in pots and I only have semi-killed my marigolds. And yes, I killed them before I even planted them. Of course, I say semi-killed. I’m determined that I have my Grandmother’s genes in me SOMEWHERE and have planted the two less dead-looking ones in hopes they will revive.
Also I’m pretty sure my tomato and cucumber plants are in shock right now. Considering my cucumber plant looked dead almost immediately after I planted it, I’ll be lucky if anything comes of that one.
This years crop includes: two tomato plants, a tomatillo, red bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, cucumber, spinach, basil, rosemary, onions, cilantro, mint and a whole host of flowers including two geraniums, lots of petunias (I know I can’t kill those!), snap dragons and a few others I’m not really sure what their names are. I have no idea what I’m doing with most of those vegetables but I figure I’ll just water them and put them in the sun and maybe talk to them a little bit. That should do the trick right? Pretty soon I’ll be able to sustain myself off of my own garden!
OK you can stop laughing now. You may think me delusional but that’s like every Boulderite’s dream. I just need some chickens and a cow and I’ll be all set.
Now, who’s taking bets on how fast I can kill these little green things?
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