My Mom’s Green Thumb
In a previous post, I wrote about how my Mom had the greenest thumb around. I’m not kidding when I say that. She can grow anything. Even dead plants come back to life under her care. Dried pieces of tree trunks grow leaves even when they have no roots. She can cut off a branch from any random bush, stick it in the ground and it will grow. Back when I was I kid, I remember that she had numerous planters sprouting all sorts of flora all over the house. There were beautiful pots, old ice cream cans, old milk cans, anything you can plant on, she planted.
Lately she’s been into growing Gumamela flowers and calamansi. Proof of her prowess is what I call the OA Calamansi because it has been producing fruits non-stop in the last year.
And she’s been practicing organic farming with this tree…only compost (from the village Eco-Center) and water. True to form, with the amount of fruit the calamansi has been producing, my Mom has not bought a singearle calamansi since last year. And this doesn’t count my occasional kupit when she’s not looking.
My Mama’s Garden
If there is one thing that I inherited from my Mom, it is the love of gardening. Although our taste in plants run in different, she has a taste for decorative flora while I prefer the edible kind, we sometimes meet in the middle. We both love flowers. We love planting them. My first experience with planting flowers was when she bought me seeds for petunias and zinnias. She gave me several pots and made me plant those seeds and had me place them on top of the “defunct” barbecue pit in our old house. This experiment proved to be the birth of my green thumb. My petunias bloomed profusely. But my green thumb could not match my Mom’s. She is know to literally stick a dead twig in the ground and it will grow. Dead driftwoods (anchors for her orchids) have come to life under her care. And even my husband (then boyfriend) would bring to her his half-dead house plants for her to rescue. Which she did, by the way.
But this isn’t about my green thumb or my Mom’s green thumb. This also isn’t about our shared love for flowers.
This is about what I found in the trash…again.
The story begins with me going to my Mom’s house to pick up “paper” for shredding which would go to Adi’s “paper drive” in school. As I was going through the pile, I chanced upon a sheet of yellow pad paper that had a masterpiece neatly written on it.
The piece was written by my Mom. Yes, she writes too and has in fact expressed her desire to go back to writing.
It’s a pretty lengthy piece. I have to commend my Mom for being so diligent in handwriting it. I can’t, for the love of me, imagine writing a piece today unless I do it on the computer.
My Mom’s masterpiece goes live tomorrow…in another post.
Snail Infestation
Most of us in this side of the planet are happy that the weather is less wacky than it was during the latter part of last year. We still get the occasional afternoon rainshower (which is unusual for this time of the year) but the temperature is quite tolerable now.
This also bids well for my garden. Last quarter, my herbs suffered a blow because of the weather’s mood swings. In the morning it would be scorching then in the afternoon there would be a downpour. PMSing isn’t this bad.
Anyway, this killed all my herbs. My dream of having a drink in our outdoor lounges while catching a whiff of my basil and rosemary shrubs all went kaput.
So I put off planting until after the holidays to take advantage of the better weather. True enough, my new plants have been thriving. Not one single mortality and they’ve been growing fast.
All this changed in the last few days when we noticed that there was a sudden surge of garden snails. We’re accustomed to seeing a few in the garden from time to time. This time, however, we had a deluge of slugs and snails. And their target, my herbs.
