I came out of the gate hot on this one. I had visions of the beautiful and bountiful garden that I could cultivate in our newly renovated backyard. I went on a spree at Walter Anderson nursery and bought all the things. I planted strawberries, green beans, sugar snap peas, edamame, okra, kale, beets, tomatoes and all sorts of other delicious and ambitious vegetable crops.
To be fair, the bar of gardening “success” is set really high for me. My mom has an incredible green thumb and grows tons of exotic Chinese vegetables, more than we could ever finish when I was a kid. Dinners of my childhood always included at least one dish of unidentifiable vegetables from the garden- water spinach, bittermelon, dark green leaves that exuded red juice when cooked, varieties of cabbage and other vegetal matter that I was informed was very nutritious. Surely some of that gardening talent was passed down to me, right?
Wrong.
It wasn’t all bad. I did manage to harvest a few handfuls of very delicious green beans, okra and edamame. I even got my kids to try some new veggies. They progressed from thinking they hated edamame, to liking it only if it was from our garden, to willingly eating edamame from a grocery store! That’s a win in my book. Beets and okra, unfortunately, are still a no-go.
The biggest problem I had was that plants just require more maintenance and energy than I was willing to give. Also, when I first set out on this hobby, I did not realize that all my efforts were really going towards cultivating crops to feed the gophers, raccoons and whatever other animal visitors were coming to pluck off our bounty at the moment of peak ripeness before I could get to it. I started putting up nets to try to protect everything but eventually found it so tedious that I decided to just let the critters have it.
As for my indoor plant adventures… I was very careful to only get cat-friendly plants, and let’s just say the cats got really friendly with the plants. They had a grand old time climbing the tree, chewing on leaves, knocking plants over to spill the soil and watch me clean it up… One way or another, the plants have all been unalived, as the kids say these days. I’m sure I also contributed by either underwatering or overwatering them, who knows? What I have learned from all of this is that Costco sells some very nice-looking fake olive trees that don’t require any attention from me and have held up well under the feline regime.
It’s a miracle that I’ve kept my kids alive for this long.