Messages from the Garden

[scrubjayspeaks]

There's not a lot to do in my garden during the winter normally. The butterfly garden is all dead, and it's not time to plant the next iteration of it. The succulents don't need a lot of water, and they're all closed up in the cold frames/under tarps/hiding in the office to survive the cold. But after weeks of ignoring the garden, I finally got around to watering them and replanting some things.

First, though, I am not permitted to do anything in the garden without supervision:



Elegant, dignified, beautiful...



...garbage fluff monster.





One of the major projects was freeing up room in the agave and aloe nurseries. I have a lot of aloe and agave, because it grows reliably in my area with only light babying on my part, and because people bring cuttings of them to give away at our club meetings A LOT. And I am all about free plants.

But they've gotten rather overcrowded, in part because, hey! I've managed to grow some really happy plants in there. So these are two of the ones threatening to take over who have now been moved to pots all of their very own. May they pup to their hearts' content.

*wipes blood from hands* I love my murder babies and my fistfuls of steak knives.





This goddamn aloe was a free cutting! Just a hacked off branch! And now it's going to bloom! It's like some kind of dragon tail! I love it! (It's also got a bunch of leaf tip necrosis from the cold! Fuck winter!)



It is, in general, blooming time for several of the plants. The euphorbia are going great guns.



And in the category of "my life is a metaphor in all ways," this is the pelargonium that was dead for months. I have killed a bunch of pelargonium, which are a kind of succulent geranium, my other collectible plant obsession. I keep buying them, because I am a fool. In desperation and denial, I just chucked the pot in with the regular geraniums and pretended I couldn't see it. And then I waited. And out of the blue, after further months, a little bit of green appeared. Now it looks like this. You can still see all the deadwood down at the bottom. Under the lush fronds of new growth.

Sometimes, it's not dead; it's just waiting for the opportune moment.

Comments

[shipperslist]

My green thumb is more like sickly green but I like reading how other, more skills people tend their leaf babies. Gardening by proxy, I guess?

Your supervisor is gorgeous. 😍

[scrubjayspeaks]

It's taken a long time for me to find my groove when it comes to gardening, because I don't really do it the way my mum does. The thing I've figured out from talking to other, far more experienced gardeners, is that we are all, to a one, just making this up as we go along. Anyone who claims to know what they're doing is either kidding themself or selling something.

We all just fling ourselves at seeds and soil and hope for the best.

[shipperslist]

”— we are all, to a one, just making this up as we go along. Anyone who claims to know what they're doing is either kidding themself or selling something.”

I feel like this applies to life in general. 🤔