My Plants

October marks a transition point for the Plant Kingdom.  Leaves scatter over my back yard, less so the front.  I used to devote part of every Veterans Day and Thanksgiving Weekend to raking but in recent years I've been content to let the lawn service's mulching mower shred and scatter the fragments.  Not ideal but good enough.  Annuals have been plucked from my outdoor garden.  Mostly disappointing harvest.  Sage and rosemary are perennials, sage surviving last winter, rosemary not.  I staked the sage upright and come spring will need to add a coating a mulch or topsoil to the garden bed to make the surface above the weed block thicker.  Parsley is apparently a biennial.  I harvested what seems an abundant overgrowth, leaving the roots.  Then in accordance with www advice, which must be true since I read it on the internet, washed and dried what I cut, removed the stems, and created two packages of labelled plastic bags which found a home in my freezer.  Apparently a similar, though more tedious process exists for basil, which grows well indoors, but I can try to salvage the flourishing outdoor container of basil and parsley that way.  I took them inside last year with a very unsatisfactory outcome.  Mint is indestructible so the outdoor container stays outside this winter.  Other planters did not do well, so just stay outside for their reset button or at least reconsideration, next spring.

While my gardening skills never matured, or maybe the talent and dedication to excellence just isn't there, I enjoy having the plants around me.  They come in two forms, a hydroponic aerogarden and three chia pots.  The basil in the chia pot did great until this week when it drooped, probably in parallel to the failure of the fluorescent bulbs on the aerogarden which illuminates the basil as well.  The other two chias have not fared well.  I gave them one last chance, introducing thyme and chives which are now on a windowsill waiting to see if germination happens.  The aerogarden has been a more fickle undertaking.  Basil always does well.  Thyme sprouted in an abundant way also but it wasn't good culinary thyme.  The leaves seemed micro, the stems that held them a stiff tangle.  Used in kitchen once, too hard to separate the leaves.  Probably could have salvaged a bouquet garni.  Other four pods a failure.  To be fair to Aerogarden, using their system seemed too expensive.  They sell their version of soil and nutrients which work better than my home made facsimiles.  To  save money and deal with local availability, I harvest their containers each year, clean them and replace with a mixture of potting soil and topsoil, sometimes vermiculite if I have any.  It will get me a strand or two of whatever herb I plant but not robust enough to take root in the underlying water, except for basil which always dominates.  Instead of their clear plastic shields for germination protection, I convert used Kcups which fit properly, though are white and opaque.  They have fertilizer tablets.  I make my own with liquid plant food proportioned into a wine bottle's worth of water, then added to the water reservoir.  I like my hydroponic garden but not enough to pay authentic aerogarden prices for it.  Where I don't have the option of bypassing the high prices are in the bulbs, which seem to have a more limited activity duration than other fluorescents.  Mine recently failed.  I had a spare, installed it, though it uses two.  I ordered two more.  Then I went to my seed supply, found five things worth a try beyond the basil that I kept, planted them, watered the plastic tubes, put a kcup atop each, and see what happens.  The worst that can happen is another failure.  I can always plant more basil.