Repotting on a dare...

Well, I was sitting around here with nothing to do... so I decided it would behoove me to do something useful... there were a few plants that needed attending to out in the lath-house.

So I went out there and started mixing the potting medium and looking at the plant and found that I just wasn't in the mood. Boredom does that to me. Fortunately, I've learned a few tricks to combat it... If something doesn't inspire me, make it an artistic challenge... DARE myself to do something. Like most guys, I can't resist a dare...

So I reached under the potting bench and came up with this little hand-made statuette of a buddist monk that I bought at a yard sale for 25 cents, and has been sitting in various flower pots ever since... And I said to myself, "Hey Handsome," because that's what I call myself, "This guy needs a little zen garden to sit in..."

So to make it a real challenge, I decided that it had to be appropriately zen, and should look like as much like a natural landscape as possible, and it had to be stuff I already had... no runs to the store.

So I spent the next 30 minutes going through pots and seeing what I had laying around, telling myself things like... "no you can't use the seashell, because if that monk is 5 feet 6 inches tall, if he's sitting by the seashell it would be 10 feet tall and I don't think there are any 10 foot sea shells, so that ain't right..." and "No you are most definitely not using the turquoise blue aquarium gravel, where did you get that hideous stuff anyway?"

Here's what I came up with... I think I pulled it off... the euphorbia looks enough like a clump of bamboo to make me happy...



and here's a close-up of the little guy that inspired it all...



But, then I had that seashell... so I decided that maybe I could use this other bonzai pot that I had out and had rejected for the zen garden and maybe I could do something else, since I had these other plants that needed to go somewhere... on this one, I decided to put zen to the side and concentrate on texture. You know, that thing that all the decorators on HGTV gush about.

Not sure I quite got the texture down, but here's what I managed to do with some plants that drastically needed some attention... some little Birdsnest Sanseverias that had broken through the side of an old plastic pot, and something that has a tag that says Notocactus umbelmianus but is really a Parodia werneri, that had gotten sunburned... turned out that this species doesn't like direct sunlight and even my shadehouse was too much for it. I'm hoping he'll do better inside...






and after that, it was 11 am and 104 degrees out there so I came in.