“Hello, Dirt. How are we today?”

– Title quoted from the fabulous movie “Ink” (2009)

A more mundane adventure; but!

Today was a day where the afternoon was full of blood, dirt, and thorns. Also known as gardening! My roommates, fiance, and I trimmed some of the dead wood and brush in the front yard. It started out pretty tame; we trimmed the grass, and some raspberries, and a couple of bushes. But then we dove into combat with a big bush in front that had thorns about a centimeter long and made me think of the brambles in Sleeping Beauty. It was all going rather well, until I discovered I was bleeding from a distinct lack of cut. Clearly the blood came from somewhere, but when I washed my hands we couldn’t figure out where! After some further tidying up, we then went on a trip to the local home improvement store where we intended to get potting soil and more paper bags for cleaning up brush and stuff, seeing as we had filled our compost bin and all the remaining two paper compost bags.

We bought a lot of seeds.

O say can you seeds….

WHICH I AM TOTALLY FINE WITH.

Only we didn’t have room to plant them all. So one of the roommates, fiance and I started group one in some of those little plastic plant starters to wait until it stops promising to frost every other week here (or every other hour. The weather is very unpredictable.).

We also had some other help.

Our friendly household black panther (He’s on loan)

THE LITTLE FLUFF!

The black panther mostly watched from the couch (Very decorous is he. Except when it’s dinner time.). The little fluff was into every bit of what we were up to. First, she had to investigate the dirt, then the seeds, then the water in the seeds, all sorts of things. Apparently, her small adventures on a leash outside have not adequately prepared her for indoor gardening.

With all of the help involved, we ended up with three containers with little dirt seed pockets. Like so!

In case you were wondering, O Reader, the three plastic trays are sitting in/on a mostly wire shoe rack.  You may also wonder how we’re keeping track of which trays are which, since we aren’t using plant markers or anything.

To which I say, Excel-sior! Or, more accurately, fiance used a charting function on some spreadsheet program and we used a clever coding system of triangles, numbers, and right and left.

The Plant for Pollinators! seeds were kindly gifted to us the last time we visited the Butterfly Pavilion, and we finally got around to planting them. We’ll see if they still sprout.

There were also a couple more plantings, on a smaller scale.

We have the lovely assortment of pots:

Both with seeds in them (above), and without (below)!

And high hopes remaining for an old box of seed starters we found in the garage. We’re not actually sure any of these will sprout.

But we’ll find out. And to quote another gardener, “There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments” (Janet Kilburn Phillips).

And maybe later in the year, we’ll have a jungle of veggies to wade through! I’m excited. If we do have one, I’ll post pictures of the little fluff pretending to be a ferocious tiger. She loves to play that game.

In the meantime,