Fresh Fish Served Daily

This one hasn’t bloomed since I bought it over two years ago. I repotted it shortly after the move, and it’s also taken well to the Texas weather.

After months of waiting, most of the seeds have finally started to resemble real plants. The basil looks nice and bushy and should make for some good Italian dishes later this summer. The only exception is the lavender, which has practically microscopic sprouts that appear to grow at the same rate as redwoods.

Since it was so nice this weekend, we went ahead and did the planting for my porch garden. Amazingly enough the mint from last year lived through the winter cold with little to no water, so we transferred that to its own planter. Now it has plenty of room to get as large as it wants without choking the other herbs. The chives from the herb box suddenly reappeared last week in another miraculous plant resurrection. We left them there and added live oregano, sage, and rosemary. The rest of it is seeds…basil, lavender, moonflowers, and marigolds. I even got another orchid to replace the one that died last year. We’ll see if the garden does a little better this year. We might try using a sun lamp to compensate for the poor lighting on the patio.

The lilies have started blooming. I can stand three feet away and still smell them.

My patio garden has been a bit hit or miss.

Miss:

The sweetpea that started off so nicely withered away and died before it ever bloomed.
Almost all of my herbs died, except for the chocolate mint. The mint is currently spindly and has no leaves.
The potato (which sprouted in my cupboard and I thought it would be funny to plant) got aphids, and spread them to one or two of my other plants. It’s also gotten so tall that I don’t have any stakes long enough to support it, so it’s falling over.

Hit:

The morning glory started blooming yesterday.
Dane got me some powder to dust the plants and kill the aphids, and I haven’t seen any recently.
The potato is starting to bloom.
The oriental lily is getting buds, as well as the pepper plant.
The orchid I was firmly convinced I would kill after a week is still alive and looks very nice. So far it is the longest lived plant I bought this year.

I went by the Home Depot yesterday to buy some more supplies. I got a huge pot for the potato, just to see if I’ll actually be able to harvest some tubers this year. I also bought some new herbs, planted some new sweetpea seeds in a long windowbox type pot, and put nasturtium seeds in the old sweetpea pot. I figure a lot of my problems stemmed from the fact that my porch does not get very much light, so I’ve started leaving some of the plants outside in the sun for a few days at a time. Hopefully they will fare better now, and I’ll try to post pictures of things when they start to bloom later on.

Also of note: almost all of the plants that I have are poisonous to the cats. Guess that means no unsupervised visits to the porch anymore.