Growing a Green Thumb

I'm working on my green thumb.  It's a serious work in progress. I have a couple of problems - I water the plants to death or I forget to water them for weeks. Apparently neither is good for growth.

Here's my porch three or four weeks ago when my parents were here. My mom helped me pick out the flowers!

You can see a hint of yellow in a blue pot above. I separated three flowers from one pot to three and it's a good thing I did because they're growing like weeds. Those yellow flowers - that's the same pot as above where all three used to fit. I have no idea what flowers these are, but they were each 100-200 yen.

I stuck to cheap flowers so if I killed them I wouldn't be heartbroken, but they're pretty too.

My basil starter kit grew like crazy last year until I transplanted it to another pot. I'm trying again this year, and I'll probably just leave them be! 

I love these tall purple ones.

I wish I knew names, but everything was in Japanese. And it was a super overcast weekend, so no sunshine to work with here. These flowers are a really vibrant purple but you can't really tell...

These little spiky things are trying to die on me. I don't know if they'll make it. I'm trying to water them less, maybe they're not as thirsty? I don't have a clue, ha.

I love desert plants, no water is okay! I had a cactus in the kitchen for a while but got too zealous with the water and drowned him. These are his replacement.

My little patio garden has also made a little friend - a spider! I don't really mind, his spiderweb is huge and I'm hoping it'll help catch some of the bugs that like to poke through our screen doors. Since the bugs are coming out like crazy right now, I'm leaving the spider be.

This is the closest I can get you... any closer and he scurried away. I was also grilling hot dogs, and I was hungry. And Jeff took this oppurtunity to close and lock the glass doors, so I had to negotiate my way back inside :)

I think the cool air and humidity is helping everything grow. I'm hoping the hot hot hot weather coming in late July doesn't scorch all the plants! Here's to  hoping I can keep them alive all summer and kill my husband's "plant killer" comments for a while.