You know the saying: “Everything they touch turns to gold”?
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Well, in my case everything I touch turns to a slightly browner version of gold … more like dead, particularly when it comes to anything resembling a plant.
I’m so bad at looking after plants I’m affectionately known among my family and friends as “The Plant Murderer”.
I’ve even killed off a few of the hardiest plants known to man … succulents. These poor cacti have survived for centuries in deserts, under blistering sun, with little or no water. And yet I have the uncanny ability to knock them off their stems just by looking at them.
I also can’t tell a pesky weed from a budding seedling, so I pull everything out while “gardening” … if that’s what you’d call my attempt to upkeep my unkempt garden.
Don’t get me wrong, I love gardens. A well-loved garden is a piece of art, a sight to behold. It’s not that I haven’t tried gardening. I have. I’m just not good at it.
I thought my inability to garden may have been because the green thumb gene skipped a generation. You see, my dear old mum had a magnificent garden. But that theory went out the window when my older sister’s green thumbness became quite obvious at a very early age. Her and her husband’s magnificent gardens have even graced magazine spreads.
But I haven’t let a little thing like suffering from brown thumb turn me off attempts at gardening.
My latest foray into plant murdering (um, I mean gardening) happened last weekend when I decided our household needed a herb garden.
So I set off to Bunnings (my husband’s second home) … by myself … and bought eight different herb seedlings and a very nice tin herb garden ensemble thingy to sit on our back porch.
But my purchase was met with a worrying look from the Bunnings checkout guy. Had he heard how bad of a gardener I was? Maybe my comment while paying: “I’m apologising in advance, little guys, for possibly a very short life” was the dead give-away.