Green Growing Things

I never thought I had mom's green thumb. She always had this magical ability to somehow know what was ailing a plant, what kind of soil it needed, whether it needed more or less water, how to make it bloom with the biggest and most colorful blossoms. She knew their names and species, the light they craved, the nutrients they wanted most, and how to set them together to create the most colorful array such that the garden was alive with color year round.

I always figured I am to animals what mom is to plants. There's a gift there, a knack, an uncanny sense of what it is and how to relate to it. Mom's roses were my cats. Mom's birch were my turtles. Mom's gladiolas were my fish. Mom's Johnny-Jump-Ups were my bunnies. And sometimes my animals and her plants interacted... sometimes favorably, sometimes not so much. (Bunnies like to eat pansies, btw.)

But this year I craved the soil. I live on the third floor of an apartment in a city. Granted, it's not like I'm in the downtown metro area where there's nothing but concrete and lampposts in every direction... but I don't exactly have a yard, either. I have animals - a cat, a mouse, a fish - but the plants were absent for the longest time. I started sneaking clippings and buying those silly little short-lived things at grocery stores, needing them somehow like a starved thing. You may or may not have remembered my minor battle with the landlord over a patch of ground. I craved the earth, and the things that grow from it... quietly, surely, determinedly.

So something happened. I'm not sure what, or how, or why. I pulled out an old seed-starter kit I bought years ago with the intent to use it for herbs and never did. Dusty and aged, I poured good potting soil - again, bought for a use it never fulfilled - into the little trays and poked seeds gathered from various places into the waiting dirt. Carefully I watched them, watering them. A few seedlings I'd nabbed from Pantheacon sat in timid pots, and I hovered over them like a mother hen, tending them carefully, needing them to survive, to sustain me even as I sustained them.

Lo and behold, the weather warmed, and little green things poked their tender shoots out of the dark moist earth. I had to guard them against the cat, who - as an indoor-only entity - saw them as a snack. Slowly but surely they grew in strength and size, joined by others of different species and type: cat-grass, nasturtium, a strange unidentifiable black-spotted bean thing. Soon I had a little army of seedlings. Quickly they outgrew the starter kit.

In one afternoon, I potted a half-dozen of the little living things. Even plants previously in pots, struggling to survive from my neglect and inattention, were repotted and carefully tended. Dirt went everywhere, old pots were dragged out of the storage, and sweat dripped down my temples to mix with the grime.

I LOVED it.

Now, on my little balcony, are two tiny pots of nasturtium, a tray of crocus, a tall pot of fresia, another of daffodil, a happy squash in flower, a tall green trunk of plumaria, three plastic pots of wide-leaved bean-thingy, another of yarrow, a cactus and aloe, all watched over by a hanging pot of cat-grass. Perhaps I don't have a garden... or maybe I made one where there wasn't one before.

Perhaps I have a green thumb after all.