Weekend Assignment: What Color Is Your Thumb?

A variegated whatsis

Weekend Assignment #211: How are your gardening skills? Do you plant flowers and trees and even shrubberies, or do you settle for weeds and concrete? Do houseplants die in your care, or grow and prosper?

Extra Credit: Is there someone you know who is better at this gardening stuff than you are?

I realize this is no great shock, but I'm not a gardener myself. Occasionally I will bring home a poinsettia or Easter lily or something from church, but when I do so I immediately place it in John's care. As you know I'm not a fan of flowers, but I do like green plants - coleus and cactus and trees and ferns and aloes and such.

refugee poinsettias

This veteran house plant has just been moved outside

John is...fair-to-middling as a gardener. He has kept certain house plants going for years inside, and taken adequate care of trees and shrubberies outside, even ones he would just as soon see die. But he wasn't able to save our grapefruit tree years ago. I don't think we ever figured out why it suddenly declined and died, although we had a few theories. It turned into a spooky dead tree of dark gray wood, and then one day it simply fell down.

Tangerine tree, but no marmalade sky

We recently picked out this tangerine tree to replace the grapefruit one. Well, okay, John did, after consulting with me. It's just part of John's project of landscaping the back yard, with a tree and a path and a garden and a porch-like area similar to what he built up front.

And does he get any help with all this? Well, no. Not really. I'm supposed to help him with one bit of manual labor tomorrow after work, but mostly I just watch admiringly and take pictures.

John's new garden: Tuffy was here.

The dogs are even less helpful, especially Tuffy. If you look closely at the back of the garden row in the shot above, you'll see the dirt has been disturbed. That's Tuffy's fault. John's worried she killed one of his new plants by digging it up.

Tuffy's interest in the garden has only one object.

It's not that Tuffy was interested in the plant, of course. She was just burying or unburying a dog biscuit.

Grass! Yum!

But hey, at least Pepper is willing to trim the grass.

Your turn: tell us of your adventures in gardening and house plant care. Write it up in your blog or journal, with a link back here. Then leave your link it the comments below, so we can come see your handiwork! I'll be back in a week with the roundup of links. And here's a bit of reassurance: don't worry if you don't get your entry in by the end of the weekend. It's called the Weekend Assignment because John Scalzi originally designed it to give folks something to write on weekends, but times have changed since then. Now the meme is launched on Thursday nights / Friday mornings, just a little later than Scalzi used to post it, and you have a whole week to respond. Still, I for one am grateful if you don't all wait until the last minute!

Karen