SoapZone Community Message Board

I say "surprisingly" because I'm fairly certain I could kill a plastic plant. When Bro was over Sunday for Father's Day, he couldn't resist giving me a few pointers; while I was doing the suggested pruning, I found what looked like two itty bitty tomato plants at the bottom of the pot. I carefully scooped them out, mindful to get the roots, and carefully transplanted them to a spot in the back flower bed. I wasn't expecting them to survive; I wasn't sure they were big enough...I wasn't even sure they were tomato plants, TBH...and the back flower bed doesn't get a lot of sun. I *do* know tomato plants like a lot of sun. What I WASN'T expecting was to return 24 hours later with a little water and find two neat little holes where the (alleged) tomato plants were. I have no idea what got them...groundhog? Skunk? A tomato-plant coveting neighbor who skulks around at night looking for plants to pilfer? It's funny how mad I am considering I'd only given the li'l plants maybe a 50-1 chance of surviving in the first place.

Also on the agricultural front...I got a bubble mailer from Sis last week. After gently squeezing it, I surmised it was a T-shirt or maybe a tank top and was looking forward to getting new clothes*

* because she's 14 years older than me, I never got her hand-me-downs when I was a child. But I've gotten a few as an adult as Sis continued to grow...rounder.

But when I ripped the bubble mailer open, I found she'd sent me some clippings from her rosemary plant, which is apparently doing very well. The roots were wrapped in a damp towel (at first I thought she'd sent me some wilted lettuce with the rosemary but no, it was just the paper towel), and she'd included some kind of powder that's supposed to help the roots take root. I carefully followed Sis' instructions...I managed to dig up (pun intended) an old pot and duct-taped the hole in the side, I went to Walmart and got the smallest bag of potting soil they had, which will still be 10x more than I need, I gingerly treated the roots (which came with instructions that made me feel like I was handling gunpowder rather than something that was supposed to give life), I planted the 8 or so stalks of rosemary according to instructions and I put the pot in the sunniest spot in our yard. And...now all but one of the stalks of rosemary is totally brown. Not sure if I did something wrong, if the heat was too much for the rosemary or if the poor herb simply spent way too much time in a bubble mailer but I'm guessing I won't have any fresh rosemary to put on my homegrown tomatoes later this year.