oops, sorry, Mr. Landlord.
What I learned this summer is that I’m not really cut out to have even the tiniest of gardens. My plan: one potted tomato plant, one pot of mint (for mojitos), and an in-ground bed of mesclun lettuce. The reality: lots of blossoms but only 5 tomatoes actually set, and only one of those grew to ripeness without being chewed upon by either bugs or squirrels (the real glory of the tomato planting was how I used a tiki torch for the support, providing a soft soil to sink the torch into so it would stop falling over,. I didn’t cut the greens while they were tiny, then they were weedwhacked by the well-meaning landlord, then they were really darn bitter. The mint was my only success, and even that was largely due to the efforts of my neighbor, who had planted several things herself, and actually watered things on a regularish basis.
I did put the mint in a pot, because even a brown thumb like me knows that mint has a tendency to take over, and is very hard to get rid of once it’s decided to live in your garden. Yesterday morning I finally took action for the winter and moved the pots from their sunlit summer location, sitting in the grass just off the corners of the bricked patio, to their winter nook under the deck stairs. As I picked up the mint pot, there was a slight ripping noise as all the thin tendrils of mint root that had extended through the drain holes separated to leave their shoots sunk deep into the lawn/garden border.
Oops, sorry, Mr. Landlord. I’m afraid we’re going to be long gone before you realize what a legacy I’ve left. If it continues to be non-freezing out there this week, but manages to stop raining, I may go out and turn over that 12” circle of soil and see if I can remove most of the roots, but I suspect that won’t entirely fix the issue. I hope your next tenants like mojitos.