Let’s all laugh out loud. The title is so not the case. It’s so far off the mark that it might as well be in another galaxy. But I do hope to one day get better at it.

I’m new to gardening. It wasn’t anything that enthused me for a lot of years. I thought I had a brown thumb due to my inability to keep house plants alive for more than a couple of months. But I actually have one (knock on wood) that I’ve kept alive for three and a half years now. Also, we never lived anywhere that had a yard that would easily allow gardening. Until now.

We moved to our current home here in Wyoming in December of 2020. The spring of 2021, I began thinking about maybe some wild flowers here and there. But with one thing and another, that didn’t happen that year. Or the next really. It took a couple of years to get the yard in some kind of decent shape. So about all I managed was sunflowers. If you feed the wild birds the right things, you pretty much get sunflowers without even trying.

It wasn’t until the spring of 2023 that I got serious about growing something. I started with easy stuff. Cilantro will pretty much grow on its own and reseed itself for the next year. And radishes are known to be about the easiest thing to grow … as long as you follow the seed planting guidelines. I didn’t do that the first time around and they were too close together to get a really good result. This year, I did much better and the photo is of the second crop. If I want, I might be able to get a third crop. Radishes sprout and mature quickly.

This is the second time I’ve started kale from seed. I did two kinds this year. And yes, I know what people say about kale, but I like it. There’s this joke about how to prepare kale that goes something like “I like to sauté my kale with lots of butter so that it slides easily out of the pan and into the garbage disposal.”

So this year, I am trying yellow bell peppers and some tomatoes from starts. The cabbages (from seed) are struggling due to it being warmer than usual, as is the Brussels’ sprouts. I didn’t take photos of those. They just don’t look very happy.

I also did flowers this year. I tore out sod in two places (that was a lot of work … the grass had been there forever and was very well established) and I made two flower beds. I started a wildflower mix from seed and some marigolds from seed. The one sunflower in one of the flowerbeds was planted by a bird.

The rest of the flowers I bought already started. I got several kinds of marigolds, dianthus (kind of a small carnation that smells really good), petunias, lemon balm, violas, hyacinth (in the early spring, done now) and several colors of verbena. The wildflower mix included some poppy seed. That was a nice surprise.

We both love looking at the flowers. And it’s a hoot to eat something you’ve grown yourself. It’s not about saving money. That’s for sure. Or time. There’s another joke that goes, “Yes. This is the time of year I spend $345 on gardening supplies so I can avoid spending $3 at the market for tomatoes.”

What it is about is being outside and nurturing something. It’s about watching it grow and blossom. Ultimately, it’s about having fun.

Quote courtesy of Literarily My Way