Adventures in Hydroponics

I'm not growing drugs. If you're interested in growing drugs, you're reading the wrong blog. High Times can probably help you out.

This blog is about basil.

There's a back story.

It was my birthday last week. And such as the tradition for giving gifts on the anniversary of one's birth, I received an Aerogarden. (Now that I have a baby of my own, I don't understand why we celebrate ourselves on our birthdays- we should toast our mums. I know that after 31 hours of labour and major abdominal surgery, I feel like I deserve props for that.).

Anyways. I got one of these. I was so excited about it. But then I felt discouraged. I can't keep cacti alive, how am I supposed to grow green things on my kitchen counter? My house is where formerly alive things go to die. Case in point- the houseplant that came with the house:

[cue lulz.]

I made a goal this year. I was going to nurture, not murder (a good goal to make when you have babies). I opened up the box and to my dismay, I noticed on the side the phrase "Some assembly required". Shit. I'm about as good at assembly as I am at nuclear physics (not good at all). So with trepidation, I fearfully dug for the manual.... The rule of thumbs with manuals is that the degree of difficulty is directly correlated to the manual's thickness. I had about seven-sixteenths of an inch of difficulty. That's a lot, in case you were wondering.

But apparently, it was my lucky day! The manual was bi-lingual (as I know remember is a legal requirement for all goods sold in this fine country) and it had pictures! And it DIDN'T come with an allen key! Hallelujah! I had it assembled in exactly eight minutes and forty three seconds.

The next set of instructions were how to 'plant' the garden. Surely this must be the stick in my proverbial spokes. Huh? You put the pods in the holes, add water, plug it in and push a button? Add food and water when the blinking light tells me to? F'real? I must have reread the instructions ten times. There had to be more than that. Lo and behold, there wasn't. I was finished. It was rather anticlimactic.

So now what? We wait.

Fast forward to today. A day like all the others. Wake, nurse JuneBug, make the bed, change and dress JuneBug, lets the dogs out, feed the cats, put the diapers in the wash, let the dogs in, feed the dogs, make coffee, and OH! What's this? A little twinkle of green peeking out of those little pods! I'm ACTUALLY doing it! I'm growing something! Okay, so the machine is growing something, but I pay the power and water, so I kinda helped. Right?

So there you have it! Even if you are botanically retarded, you can still manage to grow things in an Aerogarden. Stay tuned for updates and more unfortunate tales of failures and small victories.