And Whatever It Is Farmers Raise

My friend Lynn works in a flower shop. She called about a week ago to tell me she was on her way over with a present, a little potted lavender, because when I said I always kill my plants, she took it as a challenge. Lavender, she promised, require occasional watering and they like to be completely bone dry before watering. I’d do fine, she promised.

My aura of plant death is extra embarrassing because the women in my family who aren’t me all have green thumbs. I didn’t get the Mackay green thumb, I got the lesser-known Doom Thumb. I think it’s recessive. It’s not that I don’t like flowers, it’s just that I can’t keep up with all the required maintenance. All that remembering to water. And not letting them freeze to death.

Sometimes people ask when Stick and I plan to have children, and I remind them that I can’t be responsible for a geranium.

But now I have this pretty potted lavender, and I haven’t killed it yet. It smells nice, and it has pretty purple flowers, and if we have one thing that needs care and attention, why not have two? This is the sort of logic probably employed by crazy cat ladies.

So Stick and I picked up a couple other herbs, because I dare you to walk past the smells of mint and basil and not want them. We thought we’d take them out of their sad little supermarket pots and put them in bigger ones. Since we were getting so garden-y, we decided to give a couple of seed packets a try, too. We set up a little balcony garden, with pots of dirt where we hope to soon have plants.

Today we had the first yellow-green tips of our tiny sprouting scallions!

Or carrots. I’m not entirely sure which is which, we mixed up the pots. I’m not very good at gardening.

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