Gardening Indoors

One might think our sun porch is a greenhouse — with the many plants.  When one has gardening in the blood and can’t garden outside, inside is the next best place.  I’ve been waiting several days for good light so I could make some pictures, but apparently that is not to be — so I’ve made the pics anyway.

My violets are not at their peak, but I enjoy them just the same.  My favorite is one you may be able to see — it’s purple and white — Geraldine High School colors.  After all, I was a cheerleader in 1944.

The picture of the white plant is some kind of orchid given to me several years by a friend in Gardendale.  I tried to make the picture so you could see foliage as well as bloom.  January/February is blooming time for this one.  The foliage is not green — but burgundy with stripes — and the it’s not a pretty plant because of the straggly way it grows, but it’s wintertime blooms make it worth keeping.

There is always something that needs doing when one gardens — the third picture is a little pot full of baby African Violets that need to be separated and potted.  I rooted two violet leaves in water, then put them in soil and this is what I have. I talked a friend into taking the other little pot with just as many plants.

Now with gardening, success comes failure, too.  For the last three or four years I’ve had amaryllis bulbs (two) in separate pots that stay outside in the summer time and in the fall they come to the sun porch and put on a show about Christmas with this beautiful large red blooms.  Well, that didn’t happen this year — maybe they’ve seen their best days.  And then I have this confused plant — a Christmas Cactus — it now has one bloom.  I’ve decided it’s similar to its owner — can’t keep up with what month it is.

Several unexpected plants have arrived on the porch — they’ve been in the basement (where the large plants live), but maybe it was too cold there and John brought them upstairs — they are looking much better.  It’s Porter Weed — a plant I saw written up in Southern Living Magazine some years ago and I almost wore the computer out trying to find such.  It’s a Florida plant and we’ve had a large Porter Weed plant for some time, but last fall we decided to discard the big plant and root several little ones.  On me — now we have more than one plant to tend.

Another gardening chore you’ll be hearing about soon is the planting of tomato seed.  I grow our plants here on this porch and enjoy watching them come up and grow.  This will be an article about the almanac and planting.  Now this is really country living.