Plant Parents

For Robert and I houseplants have always been a thing. We have one plant that is over forty years old. We do not know its exact age. Apparently 2020 was the year many more people became Plant Parents.  Unfortunately, most people don’t consider the needs of plants when they make their purchase.  Someone calculated that 67% of millennials say that plant care is harder than they figured it would be. Don’t we know it!  We now have over 13,000 babies in our greenhouse and more are on the way. One might assume that we are “professionals” when it comes to growing plants (and gardening), but nothing could be further from the truth.  Every year we learn something new! And every year we are given some new challenge in dealing with our Plant Children!

I did learn from the above mentioned survey that more than 50% of gardeners talk to their plants.  We do talk to our plants and I play music for them, too.  Apparently, talking to one’s plants helps to lower stress levels (of the parents for sure, but perhaps for the plants as well).  I think music aids in the plant’s growth and thus play a wide range of music genres.  The survey said 43% of plant people have named their plants; but with our large and growing “family,” we do not assign names.  Although, we did gift an avocado plant to our son and his family named it “The Little Professor.” Two-thirds of the people in this survey were growing some edible plants.  Now this is something I understand!

Speaking of always learning something new . . . do you see the silver trays in the photo? This year Robert came up with the idea of using these trays at our workstations to help contain the soil spillage. I cannot believe it took us twenty-eight years to come up with this idea! It really does work. Anything that makes “clean up” and “keeping clean” easier is something I am in favor of implementing.

Here is an interesting factoid. More than half of the fruit and nearly one-third of the vegetables consumed by Americans are imported! I find this to be a distressing thought. If you want to support local farms and local food, join a CSA. Any CSA! Or get to the nearest tailgate market. We need to keep as much food as possible LOCAL.

We do have shares available for the 2021 Harvest Season. Here is the link to sign up!