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PapaJohnQ -> RE: sherry sherry quite contrary.. How will your garden grow? (3/5/2009 10:39:47 AM)
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Plants are just like people. Treat them right and they will grow. I grew up in the country runnng amok among the wetlands before some intellectual told us we couldn't go there anymore. I think he was the same guy who opened up the pristine beaches and nature areas to 4-wheel drive RV's so everyone would have access to nature.
When I like most rurals of my generation left the farm to work in the city, I filled my homes with plants. At the age of 34, I met a voice on the telephone, and I knew she was mine. When, during that first conversation, before I had ever seen her, I told her she was going to marry me, all I got was a disbelieving snort.
Typical hard head sub. Thirty five years later, she has realized the error of that first phone call. What has this got to do with gardens? An attitude is an attitude, and plants have issues with attitudes. All it took to wipe out a whole room of plants was for my friend to walk through the room. The plants would shrivel up and die.
Today she is the mother of two beautiful ladies in their 20's, obviously they take after me, good looking, intelligent and capable. She has taken over our apartment gardening. She raises orchids like they are weeds, tomatoes, basil, chives, garlic, corrieander, and onions fill our window boxes. She sings to plants and they thrive on her love. We bought a potted citrus tree for one of our girls. Being at the longitude of Hudson Bay, you might believe that a young citrus tree would never bloom, much less bear fruit.
Well that little tree had a dream. One day it blossomed. Weeks later a tiny orange ball developed. It took that little tree over 18 months to bring that fruit to fruition. We had to support the fruit because the "branch" feeding it was less than a millimeter in circumference. When it finally dropped off, my girls were in a status of total disbelief. It was a pale yellow color, the sickliest Orange you ever did see. My friend said, in that special voice she uses to let me know that although I may be Peter Pan to her little indian maiden, l was embarking on a course which would end up with the wrecking crew in the blue light taxi delivering me to intensive care, where if the truth be known, I have died before. (Trust a Dr, with your wife, but never with your life. She is so hard core, that she had her second daughter at the age of 37, at home with a midwife.) "You are not going to eat that are you?" she stated with an undertone of menace suggesting she had just used a safeword which I, with all due candor was ignoring, not to expand her limits, but simply because I did not think it applied. "Somebody has to, since you won't it is left to me!" I took my trusty hunting knife, sliced open the sickly fruit which looked worse on the inside than on the outside. These are the moments when I feel most dominant, although I know I may have a nasty week ahead of me. There is nolthing she hates more tha n to come home from the office, cook a gourmet meal, and transport it to the hospital 30 minutes away, come home, clean up and get ready for work the next day. She was right about the fruit. I did not eat it after all. It was the most sour and best tasting lemon I have had in years. We pulled the skin off and enjoyed 8 cups of delicious lemon tea.
There is a moral to this tale of a sour orange. Using a lot of patience, and sharing a lot of love, you can grow almost anything, anywhere. Our lemon grew in the natural light of the sun plus those miniature power saving flourescent bulbs, on only when it was too dark to see, which granted is a lot of the time. Don't go overboard with expensive plant food, Just use non-chlorinated non-flourinated water. Ours comes through thousands of miles of a limestone-sandstone aquifierand is good enough that we have never replaced oue original hydroponic stones.
If you are new to indoor gardening and have an infestation of rug rats, it may be as fascinating for you as it was for me to take your seeds and place them in drenched toilet paper in the window ledge where the warmth of the sun will come through the paper and cause those seeds that will to germinate. Birth of a plant keeps the attention of rug rats until it is time to start the guinea pig experiment. An old paper egg carton is the perfect first bed for a newly germinated seed, and love and pride grow with the plant. The rats learn to deal with patience, frustration and pride as their various efforts are met with failure and/or success. Actually the first efforts are usually met with frustration and sometimes with lying on the floor and kicking and screaming, as well as tears.
However, all in all it is well worth the effort.
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