Flowering

That was a weekend well spent. I got a lot of things done but I also spent a lot of time watching TV. Do a little yard work, watch a couple of hours of Rescue Me, do some gardening, watch a couple of hours of T-Fauxed Divine Design. I also found time to go to a boutique garden store.

Don’t you have enough plants to deal with now? Why are you shopping for more? Don’t be daft . Yes, you said that out loud. I needed a new plant because I found myself with a planter and I needed something to go in it. I could have gone to Wally World, I choose not to. This whole saga started out because I wanted some tea and I thought if I was making some tea I could also make more tea. Two weeks ago we got a couple of Tetley tea bags in our Sunday paper and I wanted to use them. I followed the instructions, which including boiling X number of cups of water until it boils and then adding the tea bags and then adding X number of more cups of water and letting sit.

I boiled the water in a pot that could hold X cups of water but when it came time to add an addition X cups of water the pot wasn’t larger enough so I moved the tea and the water to the next largest container I had available. The tea could not live in a mixing bowl. People all over the world make tea all the time and I do not think their tea lives in a mixing bowl and then I thought of my sun tea container! This would be perfect! It holds at least twice X number of cups of water and it has a spigot on the side and it would be perfect and it was recently clean. So Yay. Problem solved. Go me.

Well, the water was still hot. I assumed that if something was designed to sit in the sun for hours that it would also be designed to hold hot water. I put the sun tea container in the sink and began to pour the tea into it and it seemed fine until it seemed to be getting very full very fast and kind of maybe, shrinking. This was because it was melting into a puddle, where fortunately for my sink and myself, it didn’t choose to become one with the sink.

I left the rest of the tea in the bowl and tried to see if my new piece of sculpture was maybe recyclable - My parents kept a melted coffee maker in our garage for years because they thought they could use it again or sell it for parts or whatever and I decided I needed this thing out of my life quickly. .. But as I was taking it out to the recycling, I started to look at it and it looked like a planter! I quickly called Alphagal to confer with her and she suggested adding rocks to the base to allow for drainage. The container still had a functioning spigot and I thought that it would also help out. Yay! Reuse, Re-purpose! Recycle! Pin a green star on me.

And then I started to really look at it, if I put rocks in the bottom it wouldn’t leave enough room for adequate dirt to plant ratio. I drilled the bottom out and then went to the store looking for something that would flow prettily out of a tilted planter. I decided that Wally World wouldn’t have anything appropriate because everything at Wally World is “inside the box” and I needed a place that was more in-tune with my outside-the-box thinking vis-a-vis  my planter. I needed somewhere that knew what vis-a-vis  meant. I needed somewhere that would charge me three or even four times what Wally-World would for the same product. I needed a store with Obama bumper stickers in their parking lot.

I found my plant, Cabana Trailing Blue and a net to keep the birds off my raspberries . I found so many plants I wanted. What I really need is for Curb Appeal to give me their first annual Yard Improvement Scholarship ( full ride, books and board) and come to my front yard and transform it into an English Country Garden with lots and lots of gorgeous flowering plants in all the colors of the rainbow all the time. I have Earl Gray taste on a Tetley budget.