Garden

When my parents moved six years ago, they gave us their potted Satsuma orange tree. The first year, it produced a glorious crop of 40-50 little oranges. Then, because I’m such a horrible gardener, it was attacked by whiteflies and black sooty mold, and it took several years of regular treatments with garlic-pepper-seaweed tea, compost tea, horticultural oil, and insecticidal soap (and me spending hours with wet paper towels, gently scrubbing the soot off each individual leaf). The poor little tree was too sick to produce any oranges. Eventually, the whiteflies stopped coming back. Last spring it produced dozens of tiny little orange blossom buds like this, which turned into teeny tiny oranges, about 1 mm across… and all promptly fell off after about 2 weeks of growth. This spring we’ve got teeny tiny orange flower buds again. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for fruit!

I kill plants. With very few exceptions, plants that come under my care are doomed to suffer a slow death of thirst and neglect. I love plants and would like nothing more than to live in a house surrounded by tall trees and grass and ferns and flowers and fruits and vegetables and bushes and shrubs and hedges and gardens, but it would seriously have to come with a gardener. I really do mean well, but I just suck at caring for them properly. Whenever I acquire new plants, I’m terribly excited about them for about two weeks, and then one day I forget to water them, and suddenly it’s 3 weeks later and I remember that I have plants to take care of — make that HAD plants to take care of — and I panic and run outside and find their dried brown husks frozen in a sun-crisped rigormortis, their slow suffering and piteous cries for water and TLC stamped into their little shriveled stalks and leaves. Thank god for automatic sprinkler systems, otherwise my lawn would probably be a wasteland too. One thing I am proud of: I try to do everything organically, without nasty synthetic chemicals that can hurt me, the vegetation, animals, the air, and groundwater. I do read up a lot on organic fertilizers and pest control, and I have all the necessary ingredients for the garlic-pepper tea and the Garrett Juice fertilizer and the liquid seaweed-insecticidal soap bug killer. I use the bug killer when I see bugs and I attempt to remember (but usually forget) to fertilize monthly. Also, I have a compost pile (ok, it’s really just a heap by the side of the house where I throw scraps and leaves and junk… but it does seem to be working!) I […]