Adventures in Gardening

I grew up in a rather rural area of Michigan, surrounded by dairy farms, corn fields and two parents with green thumbs. So naturally, it seems odd not to have a garden with me here in California. However, living in an apartment, it’s fairly impossible to have full fledged utopia of flowers and vegetables, so I opted for plants that I knew could be grown in pots: tomatoes, peppers, and an assortment of herbs (I also use all of these things on a weekly basis when cooking). The problem was I neglected to remember a very important fact… I am no longer in the Midwest where it rains ten times a week and the sun only burns the albinos. Here in SoCal, it’s a different story.


Week one showed promise, and I boasted to all my friends and family back home of my wonderful porch garden. My tomato plant was blooming and my herbs seemed to be thriving. Week two, I noticed the plants starting to brown, and if I did not water them every morning, by mid day they would all be wilting. Week three, my tomato plant had decided that half its branches were going to die, a weird bug seemed to infiltrate my peppers, and I learned that parsley does not like the California sun. By week four my plants were pitiful, and I frankly did not have the time to water them five times a day…. This experiment was shaping up to be a failure.


But then I had an idea… I remembered those beautiful glass bulbs that could be filled up with water and then turned upside down into a potted plant, watering it as needed. This would solve the biggest problem… however, the military does not often permit much of a paycheck and after looking at the price on those glass bulbs and almost having a heart attack, I decided on a much cheaper idea....


Tacky much? lol

- RS