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.

Happenings.

1. I may have gotten absolutely nothing accomplished this week because the temperature has been hovering around 90* and the humidity is like living in a swamp and I'm dying.



2. I grew up without air conditioning. When we moved into our first house in California and it had air conditioning, I may have joked with Jeff about becoming high maintenance and refusing to live in any house without air conditioning ever again...

And then we moved to Japan.

No a/c in housing.



3. Life laughed at me. I may have cursed back a lot this week.



4. I cannot determine if the heat or my lack of a green thumb is killing some of my plants.

Flowers that looked like this...



...do not anymore.



5. This is my new favorite picture.



It has nothing to do with the heat or my questionable thumb. But it is a change, because my husband is actually smiling. He never smiles. He silently curses my camera any time I pull it out. This was date night and he's grumbling behind his smile, I promise.



6. I still love my short hair. Its never-ending battle to curl weirdly is tiring with all this humidity, but we're getting along for now.





7. I've been working at 0600 every day. That means I leave the house at 0545, which means I'm up before 0500.

In case you've never met me in the morning, I am no morning person. My own husband refuses to talk to me until I talk to him. I may have bitten his head off for that offense a few times in our first year of marriage. He's learned.

Anyways, when we used to live and work in California, we'd be out the house in our one car at 0600. I'd drop him off at work then commute the hour to my school and work. It was dark until I hit campus usually. And a lot of days we wouldn't get home until it was dark.

Now, I get views like this first thing in the morning.



I guess in the East the sun really does rise earlier. I don't mind it one bit.

I also get off work early enough to get a full afternoon of sunshine to play with. Yesterday I went to the beach after work. Happiness.



8. I keep finding excuses to sit on the couch in front of the fan and continue to avoid doing anything productive. Like stopping to write this basically useless blog post. Hm. I should probably turn off the TV and computer. Or I could continue watching the Daily Show...

Going Green.

One thing I've always wanted in our home is flowers/plants/greeeen. I never planted or grew anything in Lemoore because our backyard was miniscule with zero sunlight, and inside had two curious cats roaming free. I could have looked up what plants are and aren't toxic to cats, but you know how those things go.

So when summer hit here (yes, I procrastinated right past spring), I jumped at the chance to get some pots and fill them with pretty green things, confident that they wouldn't be terrorized with kitty teeth marks every day.



We went to a local home improvement store and I picked out a plant you can't kill unless you try and some pretty and cheap flowers. I potted them in blue ceramic pots I found on clearance at the BX months ago, and they brighten up the balcony every day.



On another trip, I picked up another sturdy plant to put in our living room, to bring some green inside.


I also bought a starter pack for basil. Mind you, all the directions were in Japanese so I guestimated how to plant the basil. Luckily it's a pretty basic procedure (I had soil, plant food I think, and some seed clusters). I'm seeing little sprouts this week! From what I can understand, full basil is expected in 60 days, so we'll see! I grew basil for about a month in Lemoore before it died from neglect, so this is my second try. We keep calling it "junior", or "baby basil II".





This has absolutely nothing to do with greenery but I had to share.

The BX has sellers from Japan come in with their products for a few weeks at a time. Everything from kanji decorations, fabrics, kimonos, and Japanese crafts. They've had these little wooden dolls up for about two weeks and every time I walk by them, I think I should pick one up. I mentioned that to Jeff today and he made me stop and pick one out. I found a cute little girl in a red kimono that I loved. So now we have our first authentic Japanese craft to add to his small collection from Italy and Germany. I have a handful of things from Southern Japan from previous deployments, but not from up here! She came with a little printout about the craft: Kokeshi.



She looks so pretty and bright up on top of the entertainment center.