plants

When I was in college, I was not good with plants. At first, I named them, but then I stopped because they kept dying.

This is because I had two modes. In one mode, I cared a lot about the plant and was terrified that it would die.

In the other mode, I decided not to care about the plant, out of fear that I would kill it.

When I left college, I moved into an apartment with terrible lighting. Despite many panicked attempts to prevent plant death, I accidentally killed my boyfriend's beloved and long-lived pet cactus. This, along with all of my previous attempts at growing plants, earned me the reputation of being a plant killer.

So, I took a break from growing plants for a while. Green things around the world rejoiced.

Then, on a trip to Hawaii, I got a plumeria cutting as a souvenir. This is basically a withered stick of a plumeria, cleared for transportation back to the mainland, and sold in basically every souvenir store and Wal-Mart in Hawaii. Since it seemed really unlikely that these dry sticks would ever return to being living things, my boyfriend and I decided to have a contest to see whose plumeria stick would 1) become a living thing again and 2) grow the tallest.

Deciding I did not want a dead stick in my house, I defaulted to a sunnier spot in a window at work. Many people there had desk plants, and one in particular was very good at growing things. I asked him how to plant my plumeria stick. Here are the instructions he gave me.

- Plant it in soil
- Make sure the drainage is good (put some rocks in the bottom of the pot)
- Keep it in a sunny spot
- Add water whenever the soil looks dry

Although I had thought this was what I was doing with previous plants, I rarely had done all of them at the same time.

So I tried to do everything properly with the plumeria. It helped that I honestly wasn't sure that it would grow at all.

Now, the plumeria has many leaves! It's so exciting. I have even tried growing other plants! I have sprouted an avocado and even re-grown my boyfriend's rare cactus from seeds I bought from an Australian guy on e-bay. So, in conclusion, having a "green thumb" is actually pretty simple. Also, I am naming my plants again.

Also also-- I won the contest.