It's time to get your hands dirty again!

[gelbes_gilatier]

Or at least my hands. It's been ages since I posted anything that wasn't fic or fic related, and there are reasons for that (which I will talk about in a separate post since it's a little more complicated) but hey, gardening season is nearly upon us again!


Alright. I've been pondering ordering plants online again and I was a little hesitant until now (since my student loan will run out by the end of March and I don't plan on getting a new one since I just really want to graduate already and need all the pressure I can get to do so) but then I made the mistake of buy a gardening magazine yesterday and well, here we are. Gardening bug got me again, and I decided that right now, I still have enough money to get me some nice herbs and to use that money because I genuinely love gardening and believe in treating myself.

So I ordered from the same company as last year (Rühlemann's) and made it a mix of reorders (since not all plants from last year survived the winter) and some new stuff. This is what I got (and yes, I still just really love that hybrid plant thing):

• ginger thyme (new plant)
• licorice tagetes (re-order because it looks dead, deader, deadest :( I'm trying seeds instead of a plant this year, though)
• Aztec sweet bush (re-order because I kinda suck at keeping plants alive in winter)
• lemon verbena (re-order, reason see above)
• East Indian tree basil, which is basically the clove basil from last year (re-order...)
• strawberry mint (yep, re-order...)
• chocolate mint (re-order, and an attempt at getting it right after having my fun spoiled by bugs last year)
• honey dew melon salvia (re-order which, in hindsight was the wrong re-order since the salvia I like last year was the guava salvia but what the hell, I'll make do with this one, too)
• apple salvia (re-order, at least the right one)
• cardamom (new one, this year's main experiment, since mackenziesmomma said I want to order it, so I did :D)
• water cress seeds (re-order, yes, I couldn't keep it alive, either)
• orange mint (because mackenziesmomma said I should)
• aniseed hysope seeds (which apparently are neither aniseed nor real hysope but the bees love it so I'm trying to grow them...)

Also, I have some cinnamon and lemon basil seeds and lemon balm seeds left over from last year which I'll try to grow this year. No dill this year because it might grow like a riot but damn, do the bugs love it. I might also try to grow radishes because according to the gardening magazine they grow really fast and one can harvest them from like April to September if one keeps seeding them out and they also grow on balconies. Probably no tomatoes this year because honestly, tomatoes are a fucking hassle and I think I might concentrate my energy rather on trying to, just for once, successfully grow strawberries and keep those plants that survived the winter (yet... the orange thyme from last year looks pretty good, the curry plant seems to have some life in it left, and the lavender might still be alive?) alive. Oh, right, and a little bag of seeds for "bee friendly" plants I recently picked up at the local drug store. I usually have no luck with that kind of seeds because they always turn out to be all weeds and no flowers but we'll see how they turn out this time.

So I guess I'll have to get down to it and figure out what to repot where (I have a feeling the thyme and lavender would like some bigger pots, if they are still alive), empty the old pots of dead plants and used soil, scrub them out, get new soil (ugh, I hate dragging all those soil bags home. I also hate driving but just for that, I sometimes whish I had a car and didn't hate driving so much) and possibly some new pots, start seeding out those seeds I already have here and get ready for the rest of the seeds to arrive (they usually arrive way before the plants, which will probably take until the end of April or something).

Oooh, I'm getting all tingly now!

So, anyone (in the Northern hemisphere...) got any gardening plans yet? And if yes, what are they? Balcony? Backyard? I'm dying to know!