I Am Literally Repotting the Same Plant 100 Times a Year

I'm pretty sure I don't have enough friends, because I always have WAAAAAY too many inch plants!

And aloe plants... and spider plants...

I've been baby-stepping my way through learning gardening for the past twenty-ish years or so (why did my grandpa never teach me how to work in his garden? I don't think it ever would have occurred to me to ask to be included in all the adult things the adults around me did, but it's weird that they never offered to teach me all the little skills that were supposed to make up their legacy. Give a shrug for the weirdness of families, I guess!), and in that time I've learned maybe five things. I've learned, as well, that I don't have a knack for gardening the way I do for handicrafts, but I DO have the patience for it in the way that I do NOT for cooking. 

Along the way, I've found out many plants that I wish I could keep alive but in fact cannot, among them Boston ivy, fern, and African violet, all of which I long to keep indoors in hanging pots, and none of which seem to find a life of that nature worth living with me. I have also discovered some plants that I cannot kill, who, in fact, seem to thrive under my ham-handedly neglectful care: spider plant, inch plant, aloe vera, snake plant. 

Those of you who actually know how to garden will recognize that these are the absolutely most easiest plants to care for on the entire planet, but still. Let me have my small victories, please.

The problem is that these plants are so happy that they're always dividing and conquering and making more of themselves, and I don't have enough friends to give them to and I can't bring myself to throw them away, so once a year or so I gather them all up, put them all on a table out on the deck--

--and repot them all into even more and even bigger pots, which I then have to figure out where to put. 

Y'all. I have SO many pots of inch plants. I have so many pots of spider plants, most of which I've also stuck a couple of inch plants into. I have SO MANY pots of aloe vera, most of which I've stuck a couple of inch plants into, some of which I've also stuck a spider plant into, as well. 

At my Girl Scout troop's last Bridging/Graduation party, I had the brilliant idea to bring along all of my million smaller plant babies and set up an activity for the kids to make their own potted plant setups in the Dollar Store fishbowls that we used to use for fishbowl punch:

This worked out great, and a few of the kids have reported that their own inch plants and spider plants are now bursting the seams of that Dollar Store pot and they need to repot and divide them. 

Mwa-ha-ha, the curse continues!

It's finally nice enough outside (the average last frost date in my area is May 10, so I'm cutting it a little close, but I think it'll be fine) to set up my outdoor garden areas, and so I just divided up plants AGAIN, somehow finding five more giant pots for aloe vera and inch plants to share, and putting them in an outdoor area that I *think* won't have too much sun for the aloe vera? We'll see. But if I still don't have enough friends in the fall, they'll have to come back inside, so I might as well start on making even more macrame plant hangers. And when the kids go back to college I can fill up all THEIR sunny windows, as well, way more than the couple of measly plants each that they've already let me put in.

Well, the teenager has three plants in her room, but I don't think she knows about the third one. Ahem.

But this is also the second summer in a row that the catnip that dies out in its big outdoor garden pot came back with a vengeance, so I accepted defeat, divided IT up into a billion smaller outdoor pots--

--and my plan is to try to bring those in over the winter, as well.

And the decade-old strawberry plants that my college kid has been tending in a plot in the side yard seem to have finally died of old age last year, so the other day I told her that I'd buy her some new strawberry plants and we headed over to the local greenhouse together. While she looked for strawberry plants, I picked up another basil plant, a few kale starts, a rosemary that the teenager had been asking for so she could use its cuttings for baking, and a little geranium that claims to repel mosquitos... you know, just to keep the strawberry plants company in the cart.

But then it turns out that the greenhouse had actually run out of strawberry plants, but I couldn't put the plants I had already been carting around back. I mean, we'd already bonded! So I bought them, and now I have to remember to move both the rosemary and the geranium inside if they've survived... so that's two more plants that will be indoors. Seven if you count the aloe/inch plants that I divided. Eight with the dwarf pomegranate, which hardly counts because I move that back inside every year, but I DID just put it into a bigger pot, actually, so maybe it does count. 

I mean, the kids won't even be here this fall. I could just fill their entire rooms with plants...

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