Just When I Started to Think I Had a Green Thumb

I’ve always been one of those people who wished that they were good with plants. I try to remember to give them sun and water, but more often than not I forget about them until it’s too late. By the time I come across them, they’ve shriveled up and died, and it’s back to the store for another victim.

But by some miracle, I’ve started to have plants that actually stay alive. I feel like I’ve come a long way from my first houseplant experience back in the old apartment six years ago. I bought this little plant back in August before our Corn Roast Housewarming and put it in a Twine Wrapped Vase I’d made a few years ago. It sits in the hallway windowsill upstairs and seems to do well with sunshine and the occasional half glass of water I throw in there. Dare I say, it is actually thriving.

Then I started taking care of this propos for my mom over the winter. It’s already doubled in size, so I got ambitious and bought a little succulent to go beside it.

This palm tree was a housewarming gift from my university roommates, and I got worried about it over the winter when it started to turn yellow and lose leaves, but I’ve been able to revive it as well.

And an impulse buy fern from the grocery store. My mom came to visit last week and asked me if it was real…because she knows me oh so well. I was quite proud to say that it was…and that I’d kept it alive for a whole two months. Ha!

This weekend I got a couple more little plants to put into pots around the house. At $2.50 each, if they bite the dust I won’t feel so bad. I’m starting to feel like a bonafide plant person.

Even our front flower bed it starting to come back. Now, granted Mother Nature takes care of most of it with sun and rain, but I did the pruning, mulching and black fabric last fall before the cold weather hit and by some miracle I didn’t kill everything off.

I can hardly wait for those peony bushes to start to come up and give us these incredibly beautiful dark pink blooms again.

My other favourite springtime bloom is lilacs, as they almost always come out around my birthday at the end of May. It’s encouraging to see new shoots on this bush!

So, of course I got ambitious and thought if I can keep all these plants alive in our house, surely I can grow some seedlings, right? I mean, Kindergarten classes do this stuff. So I bought this hex cube tray and the appropriate seed starter mix from the hardware store on the advice of the nice sales lady there.

I watered it, planted the seeds as recommended and put the dome on it, eagerly anticipating new shoots any day now. I waited…and waited…and waited…

Finally some stuff came up, but most of it died within the first day. I was so sad. Of the hundreds of seeds I planted, maybe 30% came up. The rest died up, rotted or just ignored me completely.

Thankfully these Thunbergia came up the quickest. We planted this last year by the chicken coop and they loved it.

It gave them some dappled light along one wall of the chicken coop and kept them cool. The flowers that bravely made their way through the chicken wire were quickly made into a safe snack for the chickens. There is nothing they love more than tearing apart flowers.

So now I’m left with trying to keep these few sad wimpy seedlings alive. Thankfully my mom had backups and has already planted them in new seeding pots…at her house…where they have a much better chance of surviving. Oh well, I’m a work in progress!