funny

Yesterday’s Declaration of Independence from Vegetable Gardening elicited some interesting responses from readers who have come to suspect the gardening bug is a disease, not an inspiration.  Two commenters, Carol and SherryH, describe their responses to the challenges of trying to maintain ornamental or vegetable container gardens in apartment-house conditions.

Boy, can I sympathize with their adventures! I also used to lug water out to a balcony (heh…once the downstairs neighbor was out there when I accidentally dumped too much on a big pot—the water overflowed and spilled off the balcony onto her noggin!).  The same issue—lugging heavy, sloppy containers of water—arises when you decide nothing will do but you must decorate your home with a forest of ficus, potted palms, pothos, creeping Charley, begonias, purple plants, spider plants, and Christmas cactus, with a few orchids thrown in for good measure.

Contemplating Carol’s strategy (get rid of the darned plants once and for all) and Sherry’s decision (keep gardening, but the stuff all has to be edible) reminded me of indoor garden hoses I used to see advertised occasionally when stacks of catalogues would arrive in the mail. The idea is that you’ll attach the hose to your kitchen or bathroom sink faucet and then all you have to drag is a hose with a shut-off sprinkler on the end. Did a little search, and lo! They still exist, and Amazon carries them! By golly, just look at that happy plant lover in the picture.

Some of the reviewers seem less than euphoric, though. As it develops, to make this gadget work you need to get an adapter. Claber makes a connector for indoor hoses, but apparently you need to be sure it actually will fit one of the fixtures in your house. Read the reviews by way of figuring that out. 

There’s also an indoor plant watering kit, which seems to be better received by reviewers. It has one of those coil hoses, allegedly forty feet long, and it includes a sprinkling wand.

If wrestling a hose on and off your kitchen faucet looks like more trouble than it’s worth, Claber makes a gadget that pumps water from a reservoir through a drip system for plants. It doesn’t obviate the problem of having to haul water, but at least it might cut down the number of watering expeditions to once every week or two.

Then there’s this doo-dad: the Plant Sitter automatic watering sensor. Looks like you attach it to a bottle of water and let it osmose (is there such a word?) into the plants for a week or so at a time. If you got some of the kind of decorative plastic bottles that come from overpriced water vendors and if your plants were pretty bushy so they’d hide the plasticware, these could reduce the hauling quotient, too. Note one reviewer says that to make it work properly you not only have to fill the cone thingie with water, you also have to prime the hose by filling it with water, too. Hmmm…this thing looks pretty interesting. Around here, it sure could save a lot on water bills in the summer, if it works. 

I’ve tried these water globe things. They’re pretty, but they don’t work well, because they either dump all their water in one swell foop or the potting soil plugs them up. Ninety-one people have had better luck than I, so I must be doing something wrong. Evidently before you insert it in the soil, you have to have watered the plant well (kind of counterproductive, no?); this will prevent the thing from emptying immediately. Also it occurs to me that you could simply rubber-band or tie a little gauze or fine mesh over the nozzle end to prevent chunks of potting soil from plugging it. Even then, though, some reviewers found them problematic.

And finally, here’s another ingenious approach that could be useful: gel-packs that leach water into the plant’s soil.  This lash-up is supposed to last 30 days. In view of the one very powerfully negative review among a fistful of raves, I’d be sure to test this a long time before going on vacation—remembering that product reviews are now liberally laced with comments from paid shills. These days I take ecstatic exclamations of joy about a product with a large tablespoonful of salt. Could be worth trying, though.

Welp, it’s pretty clear from all these better mousetraps that we’re not alone in suspecting that under certain conditions gardening is more trouble than it’s worth. As for indoor gardening, I have a better plan: silk flowers!

Even though temps are still in the low 100s and the pool is still swimmable, it looks like the worst of the heat is over. In Arizona’s low desert, this means spring is here. Again.

Yay! At last plants will start to grow again!

We had the hottest, driest August on record, and several days in July were pretty extreme—in the 118-degree range. Despite my having set the watering system to come on every day, about half the ornamentals died. The cape honeysuckle, first whacked by last winter’s 21-degree nights and then fricasseed in the withering heat, is pretty well done in. I think I’ll have the last four of those dug out this winter. The roses, which usually make it through the summer peakèd but alive, look like they’re at their last gasp. At least two of those will have to go, maybe more. The Lady Banks rose I planted last spring to help hide the pool equipment enclosure did OK—it looks a little tired, but it’s very heat-resistant. Of course, the fact that I covered it up with shade cloth may have had something to do with that. All the little companion plants that went in next to it and formed a pretty pocket garden there burned right up.

This year I’ve decided not to put in a vegetable garden. Most veggies just don’t grow very well out there. The only decent flower bed is bordered by an old creosote-soaked railroad tie, and I suspect it’s probably not healthy to eat food grown in soil where creosote has been leaching. Besides, the nearby lemon tree is now large enough that it casts enough shade to make about half that flowerbed too dark for most veggies.

And further besides, I find I don’t eat them. The only veggies that have truly grown well out there have been chard and lettuce. The chard goes berserk. But how much of the stuff can one person eat? Last spring I reached the point where I just could not look at another plateful of chard. Had to have something else!

Otherwise, edible things grow poorly out there. Tomatoes are pathetic, the carrots and beets puny, the bok choy sad… Toward the end of the season I wondered why on earth I’d put so much work and money into a garden when for the cost I could have filled the fridge with a wide variety of organic vegetables and fruit. If I’d bought the stuff at Whole Paycheck I still wouldn’t have spent as much as I did on the feckless vegetable garden.

So this year the only edibles will be herbs, grown in pots. That poolside flowerbed is gonna be filled with flowers, lots and lots of flowers.

Dropped by Baker’s last week, since it was on the way home from the client’s. There I grabbed a Tecoma x Bells of Fire, which is basically a small (I’m told) variant of Texas yellowbell with bright orange flowers. The excruciatingly frost-sensitive cape honeysuckle is also in the tecoma family, but I do know Texas yellowbells are pretty cold-hardy. I’ve never had one freeze back like the cape honeysuckle does. Every. single. winter.

So I put that into the ground near the blue plumbago, which just now is covered in sky-blue blossoms.

As for the rest of it: seeds. I’ve had it with investing dollars and backaches in plant sets. I just cleaned up the flowerbeds, mixed seed in with some potting soil to scatter the things (more or less in groups) and then mulched the top with a bunch more potting soil, which I’d got on sale at HD.

So, down in the shady area near the porch roof and the Meyer lemon, we’ll have a patch of yellow columbine and some blue penstemon. That’s assuming the seeds germinate.

Then some mixed pansies, with a band of cute little violas in front of them. Then a packet or two of Mexican primrose, which eventually will spread to fill that flowerbed, which crowds out bermudagrass, and which when happy makes a spectacular, endlessly long-lasting spread of blooms. For the continuing nonce, though, we’ll also have a few carnations and some deep red nasturtiums.

Nasturtiums, it develops, are edible. They’re apparently frost-sensitive, so I expect they won’t make it much past mid-December. But a packet only costs a buck, so it’s worth a try.

I found seeds for something called a black-eyed Susan vine. It’s apparently a vigorous tropical weed that, from the sound of it, can grow as berserk as cat’s claw. Before I looked it up and learned just how aggressive it can be, I’d already put the seeds in the ground where the Lady Banks is not covering the pool equipment enclosure well, thinking it would complement Lady Banks’s pale cream-colored blossoms nicely. Well…it may try to eat Lady Banks… We shall see.

At any rate, it could be a nice replacement for the cape honeysuckle I intend to have Gerardo dig up. The four struggling plants there soften the severity of the ugly block wall between my yard and my neighbor’s.

And so, to work.

Images

The Sun, Lykaestria, Wikipedia Commons

Black-eyed Susan vine, Thunbergia alata. Jeffdelonge. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.