After that serious post, I want to write something with more levity: maybe something like help my brain is in serious gardening mode. The problem is that I’m no gardener! I used to have some success with plants, but lately it’s black thumb for everything I touch. But I won’t give up! Nor will an excellent grandfatherly fellow volunteer, who likes to enable my desire for green things. This January he enabled it by giving me this beauty for my birthday.

Last year he gave me cuttings, but taking a vacation or two without someone to water them was a bad idea. I won’t give up this year, though. I have plenty of people to help me figure out what in the world I’m doing, and every time I tell someone what I want to do in a backyard garden, they nod sagely as if I’m making sense. Between the grandfatherly volunteer, a gardening friend, and a friend who’s a soil expert, and a friend who grew up learning about landscaping, I figure I have a good team of people to ask for help.

So a couple of weeks ago, my landlord floated the idea of a vegetable garden by me, and ever since I’ve been daydreaming about what to do and how to do it. I do think that my landlords are too overwhelmed to do anything with a vegetable garden, though, and I’d have to put some kind of fence around it so that their chocolate lab doesn’t get excited and tear up whatever I may plant. Neither of my housemates seem to have any interest or expertise in growing things, so it seems like it falls to me, the least outdoorsy of all of us, to figure out what kind of gardening I want in our backyard.

And I’m so on this. (Well, except for the part where I haven’t yet gone to the store to find prices for wood planks to make a raised bed and chicken wire to keep around the bed and talked to the landlord about what she thinks, and have I mentioned that I’m the least outdoorsy and also most disabled of everyone in this house?)

At least I have a team of people who like to talk about gardening with me!

When I last went to the garden store a couple weeks ago, I couldn’t leave without a plant. I bought a philodendron and managed to make it unhappy by forgetting to water it for a few days. Yesterday I finally got around to repotting it. Here it is in its nice new pot soaking some water up:

Here it is today in its home in the window:

It’s already perking up extremely well! Hopefully this means I did it all right and can move on to plotting a vegetable and herb garden in the backyard. Wish me luck!