My Crappy Garden

I'm a pretty foofy guy. I do have my angry moments, and there are certainly dark aspects to my personality, but by and large I prefer happiness, love and bright colors. So much so that my sister Julie, after seeing the family nameplate I painted for our front door, opined that I'd father only girls.

(Sorry, Jules. Little Fausto's on the way after all. And remember that Dad was a stud athlete but fathered two girls before he & Mom managed to come up with me.)

In high school I took the whole bright color thing to kind of a silly extreme. Miami Vice was big during my high school years, and despite living in small-town New Hampshire and having pretty much no sense of style at all, I did my middle-class best to emulate Sonny Crockett's look. Only in my case, instead of custom-made Italian silk suits, custom loafers and black Ferrari, it meant light blue cotton pants, pastel shirts, boat moccasins and a gray El Camino. It was roughly as convincing as my espresso-and-stache impression of Tony Stark. Less so probably because of the pink shirt and my inability to grow any facial hair. On top of the timid personality and confirmed reputation as a dork.

Anyway, that silly part of my personality is alive and well. It's the part that loves cartoons, the part that revels in reading to Eva in silly voices (the Winnie-the-Pooh characters are a work in progress), and a number of other foibles Kate could tell you about.

I've enjoyed a moderate bit of gardening for a while now, and since graduating college I've always loved having some flowers around. Inside or out (though you have to be careful about the kinds of flowers that attract bugs), blooms and leaves are good things. I read somewhere that keeping oxygen-producing plants in your living space can noticeably improve your state of mind--removing carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen in the local environment is a good thing--so I've made a point since then of keeping at least a few green and growing things nearby.

I had a few flower pots while at the condo, but obviously no garden. Now that Kate and I rent half of a duplex, I've made a very small effort to grow some flowers near the door. I'm not going to invest time (or money we barely have) in any landscaping, but I did pull a few weeds near the doorway and prepped a little triangular space--handily marked off with some plastic edging--for perennial seeds.

We now have a half-barrel sitting in the driveway, and then this little trianglular patch near the door. I spent the month of April mixing coffee grounds, which are very good for flowers, into the dirt. The potting soil in the half-barrel remained light and dark, but the dirt by the door, no matter how many times I dug it up and aerated it, has packed back down to roughly the texture of concrete.

In early May I planted seeds in the barrel and in the ground by the door. Among the other flowers by the door were about a dozen morning glory vines, which I was hoping would twine up around the hand railings and provide a nice colorful accent to the main entry. I even planted six morning glory seeds at the front corner of the house, so the vines might creep up the gutter pipe.

No such luck.

The barrel's looking quite nice, but the other two areas, not so much.
Even my my not-so-green-a-thumb standards, these flowers are pathetic. Just sad. I can't wait to move to Maine, where the soil is too acid, and the shade too heavy, for anything but ferns and moss. Screw the damn flowers.

(Of course, that didn't stop me from buying some fertilizer and tossing it on the ground. I'll be getting another bag of seeds and scattering those where nothing's growing now. I guess I'm chronic.