Sunday, September 8, 2024

An Occult Apperatus

 I live in an apartment, and I don't have a yard.  What we do have is a tiny little back patio, and what I've been doing is growing a few nasturtiums in pots out there every Summer.    

This is where we hang out and talk shit.


I never get tired of nasturtiums. You just cannot beat this intricate flower form - and the hummingbirds adore them!

Look how nicely this little bush form is draping!


This year The Biker presented me with a drilled-out plastic bucket he'd made and told me "Grow a vegetable dammit. You can do it." 

  So I took a white fingerling potato and set the eyes out. Lo and behold they grew.  If the tree rats don't rob me I might actually have enough in there to make a potato salad. We shall see at the end of the month.

Yeah, that's a rogue nasturtium growing in there with them. Yeah, they look ratty. It's late in the season and I've been culling the leaves as they turn yellow.  These were big, fluffy, tall plants there for awhile, though. 


WARNING: HONESTY

The loss of my garden was a huge blow. I feel it still. I couldn't even drive around the neighborhood that first summer, going past everyone's wonderful gardens in bloom, without crying. Lord how I wept. It was dumb.  I also felt cursed too. Like I was the kiss of death or something. No it doesn't make any sense. But I did.

Cursed or not, by the end of our first month in the apartment the windowsills were full of carrot tops, celery hearts and other things all rooted and growing in water glasses. I longed for a real houseplant, though; I mean, celery isn't ideal for that purpose, so I forced myself that first January to go to a good nursery and buy a ficus, figuring that I'd have to actively set a ficus on fire to kill it.

Anyway, I began to lavish a ridiculous amount of care on the ficus, and it has thanked me by continuing to be aggressively alive.


(BTW that is a picture of my husband's great grandfather in a hot rod that he built.)


Shortly thereafter I was at a garage sale and found a little spider plant that I made myself buy. Same rationale - I'd have to run over a spider plant to kill it, was my thought.  Well...it didn't go quite that way. The thing immediately began trying to climb out of its pot and nothing I could do made it happy. This was a big dramatic thing to me at the time.  After months of this, I finally took the last little crown, just  a little button of green, and set it in an egg cup full of water.  And look at this thing three years later!  


Variegated spider plant showing off it's pretty, silvery roots. This vase is sixteen inches high and made of lead crystal. Yes.  I bought my spider plant a mansion. 

And there we go. 





7 comments:

  1. Damn, sweetpea, for growing stuff without a garden, you do really well! I think that's a pothos plant and not a ficus, kiddo. Ficus are trees, not hanging/trailing plants. I know because they're the only ones i can keep alive! xoxo (Love your spider plant mansion!)

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    1. I bought it thinking it was a ficus repens 'Variegata' but the more I look at it now the more I realize that YOU'RE RIGHT. It's a pothos!

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  2. I adore Nasturtiums. In the place-before-last, we had some that decided to take over, spilling out of the tiny patch of soil we had and spreading all down the passageway! Breathtaking flowers - and once you grow one, you'll inevitably never need to plant another, as they pop up all over.

    As for spider plants - I purchased one on the "reduced" shelf at our local Homebase (DIY superstore) years and years ago, and it and many pots of its "babies" are still thriving. Outdoors! We only pot up a few of the runners to take indoors as a safeguard over winter, but the "big Mamas" just go on a shelf near the house and take their chances. We've had -8C/17.6F temperatures over winter, and yet they live on!

    Most people "kill their houseplants with kindness" - too much heat and water (especially in their normal dormant season) - whereas our Cymbidium orchid, Ficus trees, Beaucarnea and Aspidistra will stay out in the garden until at least Halloween! Jx

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    1. Nasturtiums are like living Art Nouveau. I'll always grow them. Back at the old place I had a collection of spider plants that I'd gotten as purloined 'airplanes.' Yup. See one I liked in a dentists office or something? Pop! and into my purse it went. They grow like weeds usually. I think this latest one of mine internalized some of my trauma or something!

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  3. After I sold my house and the garden that went with it, I resisted houseplants for years because they seem like such a suckass second best to an actual yard, but this last year, I broke down and bought a philodendron and since then, have kept running across plants in various garbage bins that needed rescuing.

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  4. Fab. It's not what you got but what you do with it.

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