Monday, August 4, 2008

Gardening For City Girls

I love making things grow. I'm the coworker with ten million houseplants, the neighbor with an extra two hundred tomatoes, the crazy lady skulking by your curb carting away the spider plants you have so thoughtfully labeled "free to good home."

Unfortunately, having been a workaholic of some degree for the last decade, I'm also strictly a container gardener. The whole of nature is pretty much defined as "stuff I planted" and "stuff I didn't plant there and must therefore be removed."

Here in my northern outpost of hell, I have been trying to come to terms with nature. I have allowed certain things to just stay in my yard to see what happens. Some experiments have gone very well - beautiful pink trumpet shaped flowers erupted from the funny little green weed under a shrub. Some have gone very poorly - my purple thistles did my heart good until I realized that thistles go dramatically to seed. My entire yard is covered in tiny thistle seedlings despite my removing two shopping bags full of the damn things every week.

There is one lovely plant I've been nurturing for months now. It's really very ornamental and I'd been considering digging it up, potting it, and taking it inside.

Over the weekend, I pulled up a Weed Listing (http://www.ppws.vt.edu/weedindex.htm) and started trying to figure out what everything is.

It turns out I have been nurturing a ragweed plant.

Some women aren't cut out for rural living.

1 comment:

Lahdeedah said...

Ha,

That's nothing compared to the magnificent Milkweed specimens I grew in Washington. I was so impressed, I let them grow to their full height, and bloom!