The green beans that I mentioned awhile back – oh, I guess it was in my last post even though that was more than a month ago – have all died. They flourished in the little seed starter tray, but I kept having to put off transferring them to the planters outside because it was so cold and rainy.

When I finally had a sunny weekend, only SOME of the seedlings transferred; the zucchini and a few cilantro plants are doing okay. But the green beans keeled over pretty much immediately. No beanstalk for Carla. Oh well. She didn’t seem too broken up about it.

Zucchini! My last zucchini was super prolific so I am expecting Great Things.

The plants I bought Already Started from Home Depot are thriving though. I got a jalapeno, a green bell pepper, a tomato, and a strawberry. Plants. Not, like, a single fruit of each of the previous. Poorly structured sentence.

The little tomato flowers are hiding in the center, but they are there!

I am rapidly hitting my strawberry saturation point, so maybe I need to back off until this little guy starts producing fruit.

I don’t know why I took a weird close up of the jalapeño, but what can you do.

I can’t wait for all the bell peppers to start growing because they are one of my favorite foods. Truly. They might be on my Desert Island food list, alongside tacos and margaritas and chicken paprikas.

The one thing that’s perplexing me is this weird little… multi-pot that I got on a whim. It’s so pretty and when I found it, I pictured little tufts of fresh herbs growing from every opening.

Pretty! But I have not figured out how to make it work.

But it’s hard to water, and the soil sort of… sinks down from the top. It’s also hard to get even sun on each side, even though it’s sitting in a window that gets full sun for many hours of the day. So the mint and basil are doing okay (although I seem to have over-trimmed the basil and under-trimmed the mint; I attribute that to the fact that I actually eat basil and do not eat mint; a purchase rather half-assedly thought through, I suppose), and the cilantro I’ve planted seems to be growing, if skinnily. But I am not sure if the pot is poorly designed or if we can attribute the mediocre results to user error.

Another photo that perhaps shows the pot better. I never claimed to be a good photographer. Also the giant plant to the upper right is my poor misshapen jade plant, which lives – survives against all reason, really – in its own pot.

Well! If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out!

The last time I really got gung ho about gardening was the summer before Carla was born. I grew everything from seed and oh how they flourished! I had bell peppers and tomatoes and zucchini galore. I had rosemary and thyme – my god, the thyme! – and basil and cilantro and lemon balm. (I have no idea what one DOES with lemon balm; it just sounded so lovely.) And the strawberries were so prolific I could never eat enough of them. And these were just from little back-porch containers!

At some point late in the summer, early that fall, we had a horrible storm with gale-force winds and driving rain and most of my beautiful garden was blown over. I was in hysterics. (Part of me wants to soothe myself by saying, hey, you were either newly pregnant or trying to be pregnant at that time so your hormones were a little on edge and oh also you’d just started a new job, either of which is stressful and combined are Very Stressful, and part of me wants to say HEY, it’s totally okay to become Deeply Attached to living things that you grew from tiny seeds!) It was DEVASTATING to lose all those plants. So, remembering that, this year I am approaching things with a more laissez-faire attitude. Should disaster befall my plants, oh well. (And don’t think I haven’t noticed the white spots on the pepper plants. Perhaps they are not long for this world.) If it’s early enough in the season, I will just skip on over to Home Depot and replace them. If it’s too late, I will go to the grocery store and buy whatever vegetable I desire.

We have moved past the “perhaps it will snow” stage of spring (I think), and right into eighty-degree sunshine, and today I noticed some little budlings (technical term) on the pepper plants and a couple of just-about-to-bloom flowers on the tomato. I am SO EXCITED. Not just because I love Creating Fruit, but because it will be so cool to see Carla’s reaction.

Right now, she mainly likes to peek at them, and – imitating me – tell her father that the bean stalks didn’t make it, but the zucchini looks good. And then she goes over to the strawberry plant and says, in my voice I’m sure, “And the strawberry plant is really doing well.”

Won’t she be delighted to learn that the strawberry plant will, someday in June, produce Actual Strawberries that she can eat? I think she’s going to lose her mind with happiness.