A Work In Progress

The first system was a weak one. I had a few blue buckets I would fill in the tub, and then I'd take them out to the balcony to dump onto the various seedlings. It was a thorough watering to say the least, but I wasn't growing tarot and they weren't water lilies, either. Further, the hauling of heavy water buckets grew tiresome, so for days on end I would ignore the whole enterprise. A hose would have been a godsend, but there are no hookups on the second floor.

In order to even out my water supply, I turned to a local farmers market that makes rain barrels. The hose attachment, for some reason, was about a foot and a half from the bottom of the barrel, so it took some doing to get any pressure. We put the thing on cement blocks to get some height, and now the water eeks timidly out of the hose. It's not perfect, but it's enough. The tank holds 55 gallons, which is plenty for a few weeks. What we don't catch in rain, we supplement with a hose stretched across the balcony from the washer and dryer. One day, my husband will install a proper gutter system, and we'll be really using dirt and rain.

After the awful murder of Dr. Jerry and Major Tom, I immediately killed a Camellia bush named Don. It was in early summer that I started working with herbs and vegetables, and also then when I made my first effort to actually understand the plants I was destroying. We adopted some tomato plants from Lowe's, and also jalapeños and bell peppers. I got potting soil, not garden soil, having discovered that there is a difference. I poked holes in the bottom of the planters. (Holes! Imagine that!) I tried a basil plant and some mint, planting each in giant plastic pots, way too big for their seedling size.






Slowly, they grew. I read about over-watering, and how it can turn the leaves yellow and bright green. I read about sunlight, and figured it was sunny enough. I read that some plants don't flourish in certain places, and learned that there are things called zones. Imagine my excitement when I found out that New Orleans is in the same zone as Hawaii, and all the wonderful things I saw on my honeymoon could be brought to life in my balcony jungle! I went out to the Walmart Garden Center and bought a big hibiscus plant, and promptly named it after our feisty bartender, Ferrel. Ferrel was joined by a majesty palm, Franz, and they were the first plants I ever didn't kill.






I adopted a friend's plant which she had recovered from a sorry state. It had pretty, huge leaves and grew like a bush. I wasn't sure what it was or what to name it, but I searched around and discovered it was called "diffenbachia" or "dumb cane," and was probably the reason my dog was spending most of his day scratching his face on the rug. It's toxic, even though it's terribly popular, and was definitely responsible for at least one episode of temporary blinding that I had blamed on allergies and dust in the air. Also, it wasn't supposed to be outdoors in extreme weather, and was generally intolerant of over- or under-watering. Toxic? Destructive? Fussy, stubborn? A diva? I named it after my former roommate, Tess.





By the end of the summer, I had done some homework and learned enough to be taken off the most-wanted list for plant deaths. I still didn't know why my tomato plants looked terrible and why the parsley next to the overgrown chocolate mint didn't seem to be thriving, but I was on my way. Just in time for fall, I had a plan for next year and a few notches on my gardener's belt. If we could somehow avoid a hurricane, i thought, I'll be just fine.