Silly Girl Likes Flowers

My quest to get in touch with my masculine side has been an epic fail.  I cannot for the life of me get through that book I’ve been trying to read.  It’s very unlike me to take well over a week to finish one novel.  Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m just more out of touch with my male friends that I used to be, but I’m half way through the book and all I know about this man is that he’s a middle aged pervert.  I do understand that men think about sex pretty much all the time – little secret guys… women aren’t much better if not worse – but this book talks about nothing else.  It’s terrible.

So instead of just focusing on my failure to think like a man again, I’m going to prove just how feminine and domestic I’ve become.*  

My favorite thing about living down South is the ability to have flowers almost year round.  When the rest of you Midwesterners are raking leaves and pulling up last spring's flowers, I'll be tackling pansies.  (The flower, not the girly men who play for the Vikings... ha ha.  Sorry couldn't resist.)  Last year, I did a terrible job of keeping any flowers alive for more than a month.  I got 10 hours of blistering hot, Nashville sun so it was practically impossible to stop my window boxes from drying out.  I watered them multiple teams each day and they still were too dry – plus there were plenty of days when I never made it home at night so I wouldn’t be able to water them.  Here, I get morning sun and evening sun.  Even when it’s ridiculously hot like it has been, my pretty little plants have shade and shelter during the hottest hours of the afternoon. 

My first impatien flower -
happy dance inducing.

Needless to say, this year my attempt at growing flowers this year has gone much better than in the past.  I sit on my balcony and putz with my plants almost every day.  I love how they smell, I love the pop of color I see through my sliding glass doors, and I especially love the fact that I have successfully kept them alive for more than a month.  In fact, I have nursed more than one plant back from the brink of death.  My biggest success story are two pots of what-were-supposed-to-be-impatiens.  I bought them specifically to sit outside of my front door.  It’s completely covered so I thought impatiens would do wonderfully there since they (usually) thrive in complete shade.  Yeah, not so much.  They started shriveling up and never bloomed again after the initial flowers I bought them with.  So I started moving them to a sunnier spot on the weekends - still dying.  Finally, I bought some more plants of the same variety hoping that would help, thinking maybe I just had faulty plants.  When those started dying too I decided to forget all plant logic and just move them out onto the balcony where the rest of my plants were thriving.  Imagine my surprise when they started exploding.  Now they are huge and for the first time, they have flowers again!  And flowers in completely different colors than I started with.  One pot still only has one flower but hundreds of buds, but the second pot bloomed earlier this week and now has no less than a dozen flowers.  You have no idea how excited I was.  I think I did a happy dance.

 

So now that I’m effectively bored you to death with my plant ramblings and proved I’m the biggest nerd alive…

It’s beautiful outside.  I think I’ll spend the afternoon outside with Lady Bug and my flowers.  I have some other, more girly, books to read.  Forget the rest of the responsibilities I should probably be thinking about.

*Well besides the dishes that have been stacking up all week.  I had company last weekend and I have yet to unload the dishwasher following their visit.  Without unloading the dishwasher, it’s hard to load it again so there are about two dozen drinking glasses littering my kitchen counter right now.  Be thankful that I ate off of paper plates most of the week.  As of last weekend my house was spotless but this has been too long a week to care much about some dirty glasses.