Aug 11, 2015 3 min read

How’s your garden doing by now? We planted a garden last summer and the summer before that with varying degrees of success. The zucchini and squash vines took over everything without producing very much zucchini or squash. Our tomatoes and string beans were delicious. This year, we decided to forget the garden and the accompanying workload. Luckily for us, we’re still receiving overflow zucchini from our neighbor’s garden.

Though I’m not a gardener, I do enjoy planting and tending to flowers and decorative plants. I never thought I would say that. When I was a kid, my mom would drag me to the garden center around Memorial Day and browse the aisles of petunias and begonias looking for the perfect flowers to decorate the yard and porch. I thought it was the most boring outing possible aside from going to the paint or wallpaper store. At least furniture or mattress shopping had the perks of being able to play and bounce around on the inventory. What fun are flowers? Somewhere along the line, I adopted a few house plants for my apartment and managed to keep them alive. I had a philodendron that grew to massive lengths, so I just kept winding it around the planter again and again like twine. Then, a few years later I found myself browsing the aisles of the local garden center for some asparagus ferns and geraniums to hang around my porch. How did this happen? My mom was so proud.

I enjoy taking walks after dinner and seeing all of the landscaping and flowers around our neighborhood. Some of them are quite ornate. My efforts are probably still subpar on the home gardening scale of excellence. I planted a few hostas and some ground cover last year after realizing they require little to no upkeep. Pulling weeds is a terrific way to alleviate stress. Just think of that last boss you had and yank out that weed. Don’t you feel better? This is fun for a while and always good exercise, but I eventually get lazy and adopt the spray-and-kill approach.

Geraniums seem to be my default flower. They’re beautiful, hard to kill and require nothing but water and sunlight. I bought a few big hanging baskets of geraniums years ago when I lived in Ohio and brought them home to spend the winter under a window in my parents’ garage. It was an experiment to see how many years I could milk out of the same hanging baskets without buying new ones. That was nearly five years ago, and those same geraniums are still thriving. Each late fall, I bring them inside our sunroom, where they get plenty of sunshine all winter long. They even survived the past two harsh winters and are blooming again. At this rate, I may never have to browse the aisles of the local garden center again.

Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.