Adventures in Gardening: Part One
Guys, I’ve found a new hobby. Baking my way through the apocalypse has become sweaty work now that it’s mid summer and I just can’t make myself want to turn on the oven. So I’ve turned to a new hobby, equally sweaty but outside and not around food so I’m going with it: gardening. This new hobby (which for me means lowkey obsession) mostly stems from the main character in the book I’m currently working on, who is a gardener and a florist. I started doing some research and all of the sudden, I wanted to get dirty. So I ordered some seeds and some soil and here we are. We recently had a lot of work done in our backyard and we currently have two plant beds just empty and waiting for us to fill them, so really this is coming along at the perfect time. Of course, it’s July and I probably shouldn’t be planting anything, but I’m banking on the California sunshine to help see me through. I’ll continue to give you updates as I attempt to figure this all out, but here’s the first part of my adventure!
If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago, my solution to planting flowers would have been to throw some seeds in the ground and hose them down occasionally, but turns out, you gotta do some major prep work first! So once my first set of seeds arrived (dahlias and zinnias), I gathered the rest of my supplies and got to work. I dug up these ice cream cups from somewhere in the depths of my cupboards (sometimes it pays to never throw anything away), ordered some potting soil, and grabbed one of my many measuring cups.
Using my measuring cup, I scooped some of the potting soil into the cups, mostly filling them, leaving just a smidge of room at the top. After filling them, I watered the soil a bit, making sure it was damp but not too wet (I had to add some more soil with a couple of them). Then I placed five seeds in each cup, planting them about a half an inch under the soil, according to the direction on their packets.
Once the cups were all planted with their sweet baby seeds, I placed them on the window sills in my kitchen, where it gets warm, but not super hot. There’s direct sunlight, but not for all hours of the day. After a tip from Instagram, I covered them with some plastic wrap to try to create a greenhouse-ish effect.
Now supposedly, I’ll be seeing some sprouts within a couple of weeks, but honestly, I have no idea how this little project is going to turn out. There’s a good chance I will screw it up along the way and end up with nothing *shrugs*. But hopefully these bad boys will give me something and I can transfer them outside to their new homes. If you have any gardening tips for me, please let me know as I need all the help I can get!
