Growing things

Amazingly, our experiment in growing herbs for the first time ever this year has turned out to be an enormous success. This success is defined by several outcomes: At no time did the herbs rise up and lead a rebellion, neither did they completely keel over from my alternating overzealous and underzealous caretaking, AND we even got to harvest a few leaves. None of these were consumed, however, because we placed them, with great reverence, in the Herb Hall of Fame in our kitchen.

Bolstered by such results, I was emboldened to take another step and try growing vegetables. I realize that humans have been growing their own food for some time now. Even after grocery stores began to appear, hordes of people kept on growing stuff on their own. Whereas people like me throughout history, who specialize in destroying anything green, gave up all pretense of trying to feed themselves once they realized someone else would sell them food.

But I had kept the herbs alive for some time—they actually looked heartier when we came back from a short vacation—so maybe there was hope. So, not wanting to ruin my potential protege with a lack of parenting skills, I threw myself into learning which vegetables would be suitable to grow in our conditions. These conditions included:

1. Little sun

2. Little space

3. Even less gardening ability

These restrictions left: the Shanghai rutabaga.

Fortunately this was not actually true. No offense to rutabagas, Shanghai or otherwise, but my vegetable career would have begun and ended right there if this had been the case.

I harbor some vague notions about the whole growing process, such as that everything gets planted in spring. Luckily this particular notion turns out to be inaccurate. I learned that I could start things like kale and arugula at the end of the summer. Moreover, they don't need as much sunlight as many other vegetables, or large tracts of land. I could grow them in pots.

So, kale and arugula procured, the next task was, I felt strongly, the most important part of the whole growing process: obtaining suitably adorable containers.

Planting was thus delayed thanks to the necessity of this task. The newcomers must not think they did not deserve cute homes like the flowers have, so not just any container would do. Books were considered, websites scoured, for just the right pots. Finally, the choice was made: a bright yellow rubber tote and a purple grow bag, which is made out of something like really strong felt. The yellow tote even came with a free spider, which I endeavored to convince to remain behind at the store, to no avail.

(We had intended to include here a photo of the containers, but realized one must first take such a photo before being able to share it. Oh, well.)

At this time the pots are roughly 6500 times the size of the seedlings, so clearly it is still the containers' time to shine—at least until the seedlings get a little bigger. Assuming they DO get bigger.

I'm sure that somewhere on the instructions for the seeds it says, "If you have traditionally had bad luck growing plants, well, let us know how it goes with these. To be honest, we really don't hold out a lot of hope."

But we'll prove them wrong. After all, we have cute pots.