I always wanted to garden but I've never really been able to. At my parent's house, the garden was mom's domain. Help with the weeding and don't complain too loud about the fifteenth loaf of zucchini bread. I killed a few houseplants in college, a few more as a young guy living alone.

A short while ago we started accumulating plants and I'm growing rather fond of the little guys'n'gals.

My fiancee got this cute lil guy as a birthday present. He was forgotten, alone on the window sill for a few weeks until I noticed he had dropped a few petals. He sat happily in the shotglass sized pot he came in for a few months and I just repotted him two weeks ago. There's a little shoot coming up from the root bundle and I think we're going to get a whole extra flowering stalk.

This is a Pesto Party basil and I love it, use it in marinades and on top of grilled meat all the time. I bought it because my nose pulled me into the farmers market stall and led me right to a pallet full of them. If you so much as nudge a few leaves aside to put water in the pot the whole thing erupts with spicy perfume. 10/10, waiting to grow more of this ish when it goes to seed eventually. I actually really badly overwatered it when I first got it and the stalk started to rot a bit. I cleaned it up, repotted with better soil and it's been healthy and happy ever since.

This is grocery store basil that I saved from being tossed in the garbage. It almost died twice for the same reasons as the other one, whoops, lessons learned. It doesn't smell as nice and vigorous as the pesto party but it's less spicy, more traditional, so it gets used in different applications. There are a few separate stalks and I've braided three of them to see if I can encourage them to grow in fun shapes. Did you guys know that when you pick basil leaves you're supposed to pick small leaves and let the big ones alone? The big ones have less flavor than the smaller ones and the plant is dependent on them for mass photosynthesis. The more you knoooooow.

This is lettuce doing things I've never seen lettuce do. It started off purple. Then they grew green leaves. Then the purple leaves fell off. Then one of them grew more purple leaves, which then fell off. Now the two on the right have decided to become small trees. I haven't even tried eating any of it, they mostly just confuse me. The hope was nice bushy little salad bowls and I've ended up with weeds. ???

These are succulents. If you know the name of the species, hit me, I've been too lazy to turn my google lens at the darn things. I think they look nice and I've been trying to think of how I want to repot them for long term growth and display. The little ones are going to be turned into a present for a friend I think.

This is my pride and joy though, the Plant Monster! I'm a little frustrated with how hard it is to get a good photograph of it, this one doesn't really show the scale of the hanging basket and the vines coming off the thing. The same day that I found the pesto party I came across a guy selling hanging baskets. This was the only one of its kind, had a card on it that said $10 and I loved it. I asked the vendor what it was called and he said he had no idea, it didn't have a card or anything. I bought it, took it home and hung it up in the bathroom. In the process of transportation two little shoots broke off, and on a whim I stuck them in some potting soil, and wouldn't you know it, one took root really well, so now I have two of them!

When we first got the big one it had only a couple small vines coming off of it. I'm really looking forward to watching it flourish and fill it. I have a vision of it draping all over my bathroom, possibly trying to throttle you during some late night bathroom journey. Maybe I've been reading too much r/imsorryjon, who knows.

I'm really enjoying how my appreciation for both enjoying art/artistic things and participating in art/artistic things grows with age. I hadn't really thought of this as a creative venture until I got a compliment on my windowsill arrangement. It's a nice feeling, especially because I've considered myself limited to musical expression up to this point. However! Music is art! Food is art! Gardening is art and science! Baking is necromancy!

Some friends got engaged last week on the 4th of July after 9 years of dating then we all spent the weekend on Lake Huron before they left for 4 weeks in Europe. Summer is bubbling along nicely. One day soon I'll make a cohesive post about cardiac rehab but that's for another time.

Cheers pubski, I'm going biking (And staying in the air conditioning and listening to a book while I do.)