Oh boy oh boy, it's June! We can have plants on the balcony again!
Last year I grew some questionable-looking things from a mixed bag of seeds, which was a fun experiment until they really started to get belligerent and frighteningly large in their planter boxes. (I still remember Florian, wondering dubiously in his Pfälzer accent: "Warum habt ihr Unkraut gepflanzt?") They did flower for a while, before we left town one weekend and neglected to ask anyone to water the things. Indeed, they looked perfectly capable of walking on their stalks into the kitchen to get a drink themselves!
This evening, we decided to skip last year's incubus experiment and simply picked up some unmistakably recognizable herbs from the Obi Markt for about twenty bucks. Part of what helped kill the zombies -- I mean, what ruined our garden -- last year was that we have a radioactively sunny balcony, and so it's important to get plants that like that sort of thing. Mediterranean ones do: thus we now have a rosemary bush, sage and thyme plants, and deliriously fragrant lavender twins are all getting to know each other in their new homes outside our glass doors. The balcony smells delicious. An oleander is also lording it over the far corner, feeling important because he's the biggest and needs the most water.
I decided to go ahead and do seed basil and coriander again this year, too, along with some rocket I planted next to those viney objects that miraculously appeared again in the planter boxes of old, somehow surviving diligent weeding, followed by total neglect and a deep-freeze winter. I pulled a suspiciously zombie-ish one, but let the others stay because they have intoxicatingly honey-scented, tiny white flowers. Some sort of alyssum? We shall see.
We'll also see how many bees are attracted to our lavender and opt to investigate our beers while they're at it. I may have doomed us to an eternal struggle with fuzzy stinging things. Hopefully they'll be the cute bumble type, in which case I'll pour some beer on the lavender for them.
2 comments:
I still laugh about what Florian said. They were pretty creepy looking! Good luck this year.
Your writing is absolutely adorable -- this could be a passage from a favorite children's book! Maybe I've been reading too many of them... while Katie turns everything we encounter into a friend..... but still, what a bright spot in my day!
:-)
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