Red Buds

The smallest things me extremely happy. 

Literally - the smallest things. No...not diamonds!  

I fell in love with a plant at the community garden called Pineapple Sage. There are many types of sage and they all thrive in our Northern California climate. They are drought tolerant and a really good choice for the garden. Supposedly, they are easy to grow...or hard to kill, as they say. 

Pineapple sage has beautiful bright green leaves that smell like pineapple. It's subtle when you're near it, intense when you touch the leaves. In the fall, they develop beautiful red flowers which usually attract hummingbirds. The plant looks great all year round. 

I've taken cuttings from someone else's plant several times to grow a plant of my own. Each time it first thrived and then died. I couldn't figure out what went wrong. Did I overwater it? Underwater it? Too much sun? Not enough? 

When we moved into our new house, I tried again. I planted a cutting in April in a very large plastic pot in a mostly-sunny spot. Again, it thrived and my little cutting was a lovely 2 foot tall hearty plant by July. By August, it was not looking so great and I tried moving it to a sunnier spot. It got worse. It got yellow leaves and looked kind of droopy. I was very sad. I was killing the un-killable plant. 

One day during the Kavanaugh hearings, I was pulling crabgrass and I realized my sage was trying to tell me "Mom, my shoes are too tight!". I was pretty sure it didn't like the plastic pot. It had outgrown it. So Greg helped me dig a hole in the ground and transplant it. He prepared me for the worst: this is risky, your sage might not make it. 

Six days later, I saw RED BUDS. 

This is a wonderful surprise!  Usually plants go into shock after you move them. Although Greg pointed out that the move may have shocked the sage into producing the red buds and the sage might still fail. I tempered my joy and I ran out 3 times a day to check, coo and admire it. 

Meanwhile, I also planted seeds indoors. I kept meaning to not spend $4 on vegetable starters at the nursery and to stagger the growth and not have all the veggies mature at the same time. That's when we eat the same vegetable every day for a month and then it's gone. 

I finally went to the dollar store, bought a thin foil cookie sheet and set it up at the sunniest spot in the house with a flat surface - on my desk by the big living room window. I planted spinach, lettuce, beets, chard and kohlrabi. In this little hot-house environment, the seeds sprouted in the first 2 days. 

It makes me insanely happy to see these little tiny vegetable plants growing on my desk. They are barely half an inch and I feel more pride and attachment than a normal person should. 

Full disclosure - I'm also very pleased that this endeavor cost me one dollar and that my brain found a solution to finding space. The six-packs are recycled, the seeds were free, the soil is from the garden. All I needed was a cheap tray to catch the excess water and to find a good surface in the sun. Don't ask me why it too me so long to figure out that I had room on my desk and yes, it's OK to grow vegetables next to my laptop and bills. Now it seems like it was the most obvious thing!  I would have put a plant on my desk. I just didn't think of it as a place to grow vegetables. Duh!

It was only in the past couple of weeks that I dug up the last of the summer garden. It was hard. I felt very destructive tearing out so many green things for which I felt such pride. The garden is an emotional rollercoaster. One day I'm ecstatic growing tomatoes and a few weeks later, I have to rip the vines out. 

But then (cliche coming...) one door closes and another opens. I see new red buds and forget the loss of rotting tomatoes.