Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Urban Gardening

When we first moved to Houston, my husband said we should take our old pantry shelving and grow some plants on them on our patio. I kind of gave him a look of skepticism and we didn't really talk about it again after that. It'll never work, I thought. Between the two of us there wasn't a single green thumb, or even a green toe. Every plant that has come into our home has left it dead faster than you can say, "Hey honey, did you ever water the plants?"

Nonetheless, the old pantry shelves are still out on the patio, waiting for someone to re-assemble them and put them to good use. Then the other day, Whole Foods posted this video about growing your own herbs, and I thought it was pretty cool.


I brought up the video with my husband and he said something to the effect of, "See? I told you you'd want to do it." I'm still not convinced that we can pull it off, but at least now I'm vaguely interested.

My two major concerns are 1) if we can keep anything alive that doesn't whine when it's not fed, and 2) if we have enough sunlight for anything to grow out there.

The video talks about how some herbs need more light than others, but I'm not sure my south-east facing patio gets even 4-6 hours of sunlight per day. I mean, it doesn't get satellite service and barely gets cell phone service, so how could the sun possibly get through, right? I should maybe check that out sometime. When I'm home during the day. Like I was today... Whoops.

I guess I'm also concerned about the so-called "winter" down here. What happens when it freezes? Will all my plants die? Can I fix that? Am I really responsible enough to check the forecast to preemptively save the plants from their utter demise (I'm pretty sure the answer is a resounding NO to this one)? Why did I think it was a good idea to start thinking about this project in the fall?

So more than likely I'm going to try to make this happen because I think it would be really cool to be able to go out and pluck the herbs I need for my food and use them that day. Plus if you keep them alive long enough you can actually save money! But I have a feeling it won't be until after "winter" is mostly over. In the meantime, I intend to do some research to figure out a logistics plan to keep plants alive. Maybe I'll adopt a house plant for the winter and see if I don't kill it (*insert sarcastic chuckle here*).

More later.

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