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I have a confession to make. I cannot grow things. Everything I try to plant fails. Even things that are given to me alive end up dead. Am I doomed to a lifetime of plant life massacre? I do admit, I am lazy. That’s right I said it, LAZY! I am not one who wants a high maintenance plant. I want one that you just plant and it is happy. One you cannot kill from lack of feeding or not watering for a couple of days. What I’m saying is I need a flower that will live from the droplets it receives from the sprinklers every few days. Is this too much to ask? I want a pretty yard minus the lovingly wrapping it in dung and talking to it.

Do you know any flowers of this variety? Can you give me any advice on how to get out of this plant life massacre? Does it just take a lot of work or am I missing a key ingredient? Do I just need miracle gro?

Here are some of my recent failures:

I really did have good intentions this year. I was going to start small with two sets of Poppies and a stem of raspberries. I thought I could handle two new items. When I went to Home Depot they said anything they have there will work great in this climate. I walked through the flowers for something that said Perennial on the tag to lessen the work for me in the future. I literally had to ask the worker if Perennial or annual comes back each year. I loved the look of the poppies and it said they could handle hot weather and only had to be watered once a week. BINGO! As for raspberries, well they are raspberries, YUM. I brought them home all proud of myself and well here they are now:

I received some beautiful tulips one Valentine’s day from my Visiting Teacher. I saved the bulbs until fall and planted them awaiting their wonderful blooms in spring. Here is what I got:

I got a delightful poinsettia at a work party over Christmas. It lasted a bit longer than most, but here is the poor doll after a few months with us. It has since lost all it’s red and been transplanted to a pot I painted blue. It ended up looking kind of like a Bonsai tree. I should have taken a pic. It has taken a permanent field trip to my hubby’s cubicle. (He will not give up on things as you will see)

My neighbor gave me an Amaryllis she had received as a gift because “she did not have time for it.” Granted this one was partly not my fault. When I opened the box it had already started to bloom and the stem was growing at a 90 degree angle from the bulb. So naturally I tried to coax it to being somewhat straight. Bye bye flower. It completely broke off. Just in time for me to read on the box that they bloom once a year. Yay. I hoped by some miracle it might turn into something beautiful. I had always wanted an amaryllis. Here it is now, literally 2 1/2 feet of leaf.

Here’s one that came in to the marriage with my husband. This plant is over five years old, so I guess it is our one “success.” This thing was deader than dead in my husbands apartment. It was literally a dry stem sticking out of the dirt, but my hubby does not like to give up on things (thus all the other ugly plants hanging around). We decided to nurse it back to health so we stuck an artichoke leaf in the dirt for some compost food (no idea what we were doing obviously) and he watered it religiously. That little stem grew in to a leaf and then another and then another. That little stem is now one really long stem that we wrap around and around until it somewhat resembles a plant.

I do have two plants that seem to thrive pretty well. Notice the life support. I bought myself some of those blown glass watering globes and they seem to work pretty well.

So, let’s review…five failures, a one stem wonder and two on life support. Thank goodness the only nursery I will ever be in charge of is my son’s. And he is still thriving. 🙂

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