Let us try this again, shall we?

Sad little mint plant

After this winter that seemed to kill just about everything, the mint did not come back. I am not entirely shocked here, I mean it was in a small pot and not the ground, but it means we are yet again redoing the living chair.

healthy new peppermint plant

 This time we used Peppermint for two reasons. The first being we never did much with the chocolate mint besides Pooka and her friend K going through and eating a leaf here or there to get rid of chive breath after playing in the herb bed. The second reason is peppermint is in a tea blend a girlfriend makes for me to help me sleep, and this is one more ingredient I can grow at home and dry. Pooka loved getting to plant the new plant.

The chair has moved

We did move the chair from one side of the front porch to another. This spot will be a tad bit shadier (so we are less likely to kill said plant) and it makes it much easier to water the mint. Now when the kids bring home water in their water bottles from school, I send them out to water the mint or the garden. Hopefully this will help keep the mint plant alive as well.

Living chair

Sorry for disappearing. I know it was unannounced but life has been weird of late. I will have first of the month garden pictures up probably tomorrow. Oh to have the world be normal.

I wanted to tell you about something we are trying this year. We had this metal patio chair. It was a great chair, until the day I sat in it and the springs gave out which sent me tumbling into the house. I had gone completely over backwards and had a splitting headache to thank for it. The chair was in great condition aside from this fatal flaw, so I wasn't ready to just pitch it. All last summer we kept putting it in corners and telling people not to sit in it, unsure what to do with it. We did notice it held a pot fairly nicely.

A dead patio chair

This spring, I was really ready to just pitch it. Pooka wanted to reuse it, so the idea of a "living chair" was born. Daddy took the chair into the garage and cut out a hole in the seat of the chair. Now we did measure the pot I had found for the chair first and cut it to fit.

Looks like the pot fits

Next, Pooka and I went and got a mint plant. We figured we would use their sprawling tendancies to our advantage. In this case we used Chocolate Mint. Pooka said it smelled nice and was curious to try it. Of both my kids, this one has the sweet tooth. She loves just pulling leaves off it.

Chocolate mint anyone

Pooka planted the mint in the designated pot. She loved the idea of a living chair she could eat. In fact, it was a couple of days between parts of it, and she was asking daily if we could finish it (if not hourly).

Planting mint

We placed the chair in the corner we planed to leave it in. Then we took the rope that came with the pot (it was designed to be a hanging pot) and wove the rope into the chair. The chair's diamond patter gave us the ablitity to weave the rope in without having to use fasteners

Installing the rope

We weaved the rope into the chair for all three supports. The resulting hanger gave the bottom a nice support so all the weight wasn't on the lip of the pot.

Finished supports

Lastly, we set the pot into the chair and walked away. Now I will admit this first attempt seen below died because I tried to cram too much into the pot. Since then, we went back to just a chocolate mint and the plant is doing much better.  We also moved the chair a bit further into the shade and it seems to be helping as well. This picture was actually taken earlier this spring, but I promise I will update you soon on how the living chair has progressed.

beginings of a living chair

Snack Time

Having a garden generally means (in theory) that Pooka can go outside and pick anything she wants to eat and go. Lately Pooka has decided that it is fun to just go outside and pick the herb leaves. It got to a point where daily she was asking "Can I try this plant? What does this one taste like?" Considering how excited I am that she is trying all these things, I told her to pick whichever herbs she wanted and basically gave her blanket permission to eat anything she wants out of the front herb bed.

Herb garden

She does this about daily, just walks out there and starts munching. I just tell myself there are worst things she could be eating. However, on Tuesday, Pooka had her friend K over to play. What did they spend most of the afternoon doing? Eating out of the herb bed, especially the chives plant.

Can you find the chives? They are the most cut back plant.

 They would go over and eat a bunch of chives until they realized their breath was getting a bit stinky then run over to the mint plant and eat some of that, then go back to the chives. The poor little chive plant is looking rather depleted, but this is why we grow plants, to eat them. At least both girls are adventurous enough to try new things.

I did it

I managed to kill mint. How, I don't know and may never know, but I killed an entire pot of mint. After I pulled it out of the pot, this is what it looked like. It's dead dead. The lady at the nursery couldn't even figure out how I did it.

So I am trying again. The mint is fairly important to a project Pooka and I are doing, so we are didn't want to give up yet. Pooka and I went to the nursery and brought home another chocolate mint plant.

 It was fairly root bound, but we broke it up a bit and planted it. Hopefully it will do better in the pot.

Now its all planted. I guess I just need to make sure I try and keep this alive. I think part of the problem was there were 2 plants in this pot, so we went down to one.

Going to the nursery, Pooka's going to get plants...

If you remember, Last Thursday Pooka and I went to the nursery to "plan out what she wanted to buy."

Well, if you remember, they didn't have tomatillos that Pooka has been asking me for since January, but said to call on Friday to see if they got them in. We called Friday, and nope, they weren't in yet. We called on Saturday morning and someone said they had come in. So Pooka and I talked Daddy and Brother into coming because I wanted to know what I had to save space for in the garden and Pooka wanted her tomatillos.

We got to the farther away nursery and couldn't find them. We asked and apparently there was a miscommunication because they had not arrived and were probably not going to. Sigh...

Yes, this meant a very very upset Pooka. I jumped in and made a deal with her. If she gave me $10 of her birthday money to buy herbs for the front bed, I would take her to the nursery we usually go to and I would buy her tomatillos with the $10.

This meant she would get to go to 2 nurseries and get her tomatillos. So she wandered around the Far Away nursery and found a few things she liked. Another strawberry plant, a lavender plant, a chocolate mint plant, a venus fly trap (Wait, how does this make food for me?) and I got us an aloe 

plant (since I had a feeling we may need it with all the outside time coming up), some more thyme.

Haul from store A

The venus fly trap has become a favorite with Pooka. She has also asked for a drosera plant, but she didn't have enough money. I told her one carnivorous plant at a time please.

 

Flies anyone?

But now the search was on for tomatillos. I called our favorite nursery just blocks from our house and they said "We should still have some." Luckily it was on our way home so we stopped by. Daddy and Brother waited in the car since as Brother put it, "It is just another nursery." True, but this one had what Pooka wanted.  

 

We went back to the greenhouse with the vegetables and they had 6 tomatillo plants left. Thank goodness. Pooka decided to get 3. Since she still had some money left over, we got some romaine lettuce seeds so that we can hopefully grow some lettuce everyone will like.Now to just get it all in the ground.

Tomatillos and lettuce seeds