Plants Need Love Too!

The codependency does not end with animals.  My plants are just as needy.  I am probably the worst gardener in the history of creation, but that doesn't stop me from fancying myself an amateur homesteader every spring and filling my earth boxes with seeds.  I even start seeds indoors while the weather is still awful, hoping to kick start things and stretch the season longer.

Things did not go as planned this year.

Meanwhile, the pets are back to normal.  Tess is crazed with chasing every fly, bee, wasp, and bird that happens to even think about setting wing in my backyard.  She is up the stairs of the deck and down the stairs, racing through the backyard, growling, and waving her tail around like a bushy rudder.  Percy is back to announcing to the world every time he needs to use the bathroom and now he's graduating to "Hey, human, it's five in the morning, you're still in bed, I'm hungry, and oh, look at this object here on the floor that I can make the most noise with so that you will get irritated and get out of bed."  Percy's new favorite thing is to burrow under the piece of sample carpeting I keep in the bedroom as a sort of place mat for Tess' bowls.  Apparently it is now Percy's mole hole.  Puckett continues to glare at everyone like they are beneath her and shouldn't even be allowed to exist.  She has appointed herself as food police and hawk eyes the food bowls even when she's not hungry.  And Willow, she's just retarded as usual.

I think maybe the animals are jealous of my plants.  In the first place Percy and Willow are obsessed with anything green that comes in a pot.  When I brought my first set of pansies home to deadhead and re-pot, they were so beside themselves, sniffing and pawing at the blooms, I had to move the flowers outside lest the cats expire on the spot with their excitement.  I spend a rather large amount of time deadheading said flowers, watering my vegetable boxes, and watching them like I expect them to start blooming right in front of my eyes.  It's a little more interesting than watching grass grow but about as productive.  I have already killed four seedlings when I tried to transplant them from their starter pots to the boxes outside.  Clearly the plants did not want to go outside, preferring to remain indoors getting their every whim addressed.  When I made the decision to move them outside, they protested by dying immediately.  It has been raining for days here and my carrot seedlings - planted directly outside - were horrified at the amount of water washing out their boxes so they all drowned one by one.  I now have four carrot seedlings struggling for life now that the sun as decided to show its face again; one extremely stubborn cucumber seedling who got it's own little makeshift house to protect it when the monsoon hit last week complete with hail; and two tomato seedlings that seem to glare at me in accusation every time I lean down to check on them.  One has reluctantly sprouted some extra leaves, pretty much telling me "Fine, I'll grow, but you can suck it."

The peppers refuse to show their faces.  I planted those seeds two weeks ago and there is nothing in that box.  They didn't even like the plant food I added to the soil.

As for the beans and the peas, they did great until Tess got jealous of how much time I spent weeding and watering them and dug them up, starting on one end of the box, and leaving a crater the perfect size of her paw in the soil.  One bean plant hung feebly to the dirt, waving its leaves and crying, "Help me, help me!"  Miraculously I managed to save this one, carefully shoving it back in the dirt, patting everything down and watering it until it was tamped down.  Peas and beans are pretty tough and a few of them are fine, but to keep Tess out there are now stakes and barriers all along the boxes.  I also dropped more seeds in the ground, hoping for the best. I can almost see the plants sticking their tongues out at the dog, sneering, "Nyah, nyah, nyah."

Tess continues to let me know of her displeasure by beating on the flower pots with her pouf of a tail every time she whirls around on the deck to go barreling downstairs.  The flowers are starting to wilt in the sun so they get moved to the shade every day at about noon.  They also have dog hair stuck all over their blooms. They are not pleased and they let me know it.

And now the gang has been joined by one little watermelon seedling.  It peeked out this morning, tentatively looking around to see if the forty days and nights of rain really are over and it can actually enjoy a bit of sunshine.  It's just the cutest thing, and despite my tendency to tell my plants, "Sink or swim, guys, sink or swim," this little guy is probably going to get the royal treatment just because I'm so glad it finally broke through the soil.

Seriously, it may not be the pets and plants that are codependent.  Maybe it's just me.