How does your garden grow?

No, seriously. I want to know.

Because my "garden" does not grow.

Sadly I seem to have inherited my mom's black thumb instead of her mom's green thumb. My grandma would be so disappointed - or maybe she would at least help me out.

When I quit my old job and had a few weeks to myself, I decided to try planting some flowers. We have a small planter box next to the steps going up to our front door that I gave a slight makeover, since at the time it only had a thin layer of old dirt and an ugly collection of dead leaves. Our landlord does not seem to care about the small planter box and it apparently does not fit within the limited landscaping services included in our rent. So I bought a few supplies, some new dirt (it still kills me that you have to buy dirt), and some seeds - my biggest mistake. I originally wanted to get simple potted flowers that I could just take out of the pot and put in the planter box, water them, and voila! Beautiful flowers, minimal work! But of course when we do something, Bo wants to do the whole thing ourselves, from scratch. So I planted the seeds and watered them according to the instructions and after just a few days, I saw some green come through the dirt! Success! Over time, they got a little bigger and stayed green, but...no flowers. Never. After a few months of watering all we had to show were a few measly green leaves. I get impatient when I try something with a good effort but don't see results, so I stopped caring about the unsuccessful flowers and eventually gave up. To hell with the flowers, let's get a dog instead (yes, we got Molly the next week!).

Well, Bo wouldn't have it. He was determined to revive the flowers, so they are now "his" plants - which is fine with me - Molly is "my" puppy. (And we call them plants since we have no proof of them actually being flowers.) Unfortunately Bo has been traveling for work a lot lately, and he left me responsible for watering the plants. Yep, you guessed it, I failed him and the plants are near death again.

sad plants

Every time Bo got home from a work trip he was so upset about his dying plants - but it just seems like a waste of time and water to me. I can't even remember what kind of flower I had picked out, but they were supposed to have already bloomed. If we are really bored one day we might give it a try again with some new flowers... though most likely of the potted variety.