Category: Uncategorized

Survival of the Fittest

Happy 2019! It’s the first day of the new year and I’m looking forward to each and every day. I’m especially excited about sharing my passion of indoor and outdoor gardening. I’m an amateur at best but I love being surrounded by the beauty that flowers and luscious greenery bring into my own little corner of the world. My lack of knowledge doesn’t seem to deter me and I’ve convinced myself that my passion alone will sustain my growing beauties until my knowing catches up.

Sometimes I think I’ve situated myself in the wrong corner of the world because the outdoor growing season is so short here in Pennsylvania. I drag my houseplants inside as soon as the temperatures start dropping and I’ve said my goodbyes to my beautiful perennials in my flour gardens until spring. My houseplants are nothing more than toddlers who immediately demonstrate tantrums and bad behavior in the weeks following their captivity and confinement in the dark spaces in my house. With over one hundred plants it is difficult to offer all of them ideal lighting. The cold temperature outdoors means the furnace comes on indoors and surrounds them in dry, arid conditions. Soon they start shedding their leaves and depositing enough of them for me to start a nice little compost pile if I so desired. And invariably the two dogs and three cats distribute the droppings in plant free zones in the house such as my bed or the bathtub. Its a full time job just trying to keep them alive until spring (the plants not the animals). Despite all of my ardent attempts I inevitably lose a handful throughout the winter season. And finally those that did survive or thrive in their winter home will go back outside and reward me with another summer full of the colors of the rainbow. Of course I suppose if it weren’t for those few months when they do bring so much joy to my life I might give up on them completely and find something else to fill my time. But honestly those few months full of beauty fuel my passion enough for me not to give up on them through these long winter months.

So here we are the first of January and my struggle is real to sustain my beauties in a real life survival of the fittest. I’ll water and prune and move them from one room to another for the next four months until the temperatures are warm enough that we can begin to renew our relationship and I the love that I truly have for them.

Stay positive today and everyday in the new year. Enjoy a walk through your garden peeps!

Flowerkeeper

Planting a Seed

All it takes is a single seed to grow a beautiful flower and with the proper nurturing and all the right conditions anyone so inclined can grow a beautiful garden.

The seed was planted and my journey here would begin about a year ago when my youngest son of twenty two sat down across from me at my usual spot at our messy kitchen table. It was soon evident that he was deeply troubled that particular day and having a difficult moment in his life. This would be one of those meaningful conversations, I knew, that would require me to muster up some motherly wisdom and bring him to a better place in his young life. I will admit that it’s in those times that I can’t always come up with the right words. He was struggling with where he was in life and where he wanted to be. He’d opted out of college and was working a very physically challenging job at a local sawmill and he was realizing that he wanted to be doing something more fulfilling. I suggested he look into using the power of the internet, as so many seem to be doing, to move his life in a more satisfying direction. I suggested he consider starting a blog to share some of his very deep and powerful thoughts that he’d shared with me on so many occasions and perhaps doing some research on ways that he could make money.

A longer story short, he did both of those things since that day in our kitchen. He actually started his own blog and posted three very well written posts and then stopped. He also set up an online drop shipping store with some terrific marketing ideas but he hasn’t launched it to date. To anyone other than his mother it might seem that he quit before he realized any success or reward, but I have watched him mature into quite an extraordinary young man in this last year, in part, because he followed my advice. The time he’d spent on the computer trying to learn how to do those things actually lead him to follow some very motivational people online. As he has followed those people and listened to their seeds of wisdom he has matured into an amazing young man with his own ideas and plans to start posting to his blog again soon.

And so just recently my son planted another seed and suggested that I take my own advice. He encouraged me to use my passion for indoor and outdoor gardening and all things related, start a blog and launch an online business, neither of which I know anything about. But here it is….good or bad….my first blog post about the birth of my blog. This may have been a long winded introduction but it’s the beginning of my new adventure and I’m looking forward to having fun with it and making new friends.

Stay positive today and enjoy a walk through your garden!

Flowerkeeper