Look Ma...I Planted aTree!

Growing up, our house was always filled with plants.  One plant, a favorite of my mom's, poured its long leaf covered vines all the way across and down our piano. Another similar plant sat on a plant stand in the corner of the room, and at least five others called different parts of the living room their home.

I suppose it made sense that our house was always filled with so many plants. After all, my mom had a PhD in plant physiology.

My brother, grandfather, mom, me, and my grandmother on my mom's PhD graduation day...one of the proudest moments of my life.

More importantly, she loved plants. Despite her extremely busy schedule (conducting research as a postdoc while being an exceptionally wonderful single mother to my brother and me), she always made time to tend to our plants. This included watering the plants, trimming them, and singing to them. No, that was not a typo...my mom used to sing to our plants. You see, my mom believed that plants, like people, needed love, encouragement, and a little bit of music to blossom. So, as she watered our plants, she would sing songs by Hayedeh to them.

Flash forward to my adult life...When Dr. Love and I married in 2009, I moved into his bachelor pad. I immediately tried to incorporate some of "me" into the space. Naturally, this included the purchase of a plant - more specifically, a basil plant - for our tiny sliver of a balcony. While our love developed and expanded during our time at the condo, my basil plant shrank and shriveled. I bought new ones, but one by one, they met their maker. Three basil plants later, it became very apparent to me that our condo was not a love nest for all. There was not enough sun for the plants, and I suppose I may not have been giving them the sufficient amount of love or water that they needed either.

In 2011, when we moved into our new home, among the many things that most excited me about her new home was the amount of sun that poured in and all around around it, including onto the patio.  I could not wait to try my hand at planting and gardening again. I just had to decide what I wanted to plant.  About a decade earlier, my maternal grandmother, an avid gardener (and cook, and baker, and all-around amazing person), had taken on the daunting challenge of transforming my aunt's huge and dirt-filled garden planters into a heaven on earth. Among the most beautiful fruits of my grandmother's labor were the proud and vibrant snap dragons that would blossom spring after spring and would later serve as a reminder of the woman who had planted each and every one with her bare hands.

My grandmother in my aunt's garden with the snap dragons in the forefront.

In her memory, and as a reminder of all of the wonderful memories of a time when all of my family was together, I chose to plant snap dragons.

I, first, removed the bamboo shoots that the previous owner had planted in a planter on our patio and emptied out about half of the soil (I was too lazy to remove all of it). I then added some fresh soil and planted some small and fragile looking snap dragons about 6 inches apart from each other in a zigzag pattern. To be honest, while I hoped that they would grow to be as beautiful as the ones my grandmother had planted and as healthy as all of my mom's plants, I highly doubted they'd live to see spring. After all, I had a bad track record and was lazy about watering them. Little did I know that Dr. Love, my partner in all things including the botanical arts, had been emptying our aquarium water - fishy poop and all - into the planter every time he cleaned the tank. Turns out that our fish are more than just the cutest little dudes in the world...they are also the producers of some of the most amazing fertilizer known to man. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but their poop is seriously amazing. Don't believe me, look below...

Spring has come and boy have our snap dragons sprung!!!!

I suppose the success of my snap dragon experiment gave me the false impression that I had inherited a green thumb, because I decided to forge forward with my gardening adventures. A few weeks ago, on a warm and sunny spring day, I got the crazy idea to plant four herbs (my old friend basil, cilantro, oregano, and mint), bell peppers, and a peach tree. Yes, I planted a peach tree. To be precise, it's a Bonanza Dwarf Peach Tree. Smaller tree = smaller roots = planting it in a pot is a-okay. According to all of my research, the tree is capable of thriving and producing fruit when planted in a pot. The only challenge, above and beyond the normal list of "tree planting challenges", is the fact that the pot needs to be replaced by a bigger pot as time goes by and the plant's roots grow. No biggie......I hope. The challenge I had, naively, not anticipated facing was that of leaf limpness and injury, as evidenced below...

Not only are the leaves on my peach tree limp and unhappy looking, but so are the leaves on my basil and cilantro plants. FYI, herbs are supposed to be one of the easiest things to grow. So, I am, as you may imagine, a bit disappointed and shocked that they are not doing well.  Despite all of the water, sun, and green thumb genes in the world, it appears that I am still not giving my plants everything they need...or quite possibly, I am giving them too much of what they need. My guess, too little singing, too much water, and a little bit of bug/animal intervention. So, for the next couple of weeks, I'll be doing more online research, watering less, and belting out some of my mom's all-time favorite Hayedeh songs in the hopes that my peach tree and herbs will grow to be as healthy as my snap dragons (and bell pepper plant, more on that in a later post). I wouldn't mind a little bit of heavenly intervention from my mom and grandmother either, wink wink.