The Old College Try in Gardening

I'm going to start this off with the disclaimer that I am not much of a plant person. Really. If you want to meet a plant person you should introduce yourself to my mother, who is the sort of person who knows the name of every plant you'd ever come across and goes on about them the same way I am capable of going on about stars. During my childhood it was a given that my mom would carefully nurse a stray plant or two from wherever we were so she could replant them at home, customs be dammed, and that we'd need to set aside a day to visit the local botanical garden. Trust me, there is no way I will ever count as a plant person in comparison to my mother.

But regardless of the extent of my green thumb some of those genes certainly passed over, and compared to the average college denizen I am a plant person. Here's what my motley little garden looks like-

In the back, the big one in the middle is an African violet with pretty purple flowers, the one on the right is a crawling ivy that grows incredibly quickly, and the one on the left is a potted palm that I got at the poster/plant sale at the beginning of the year. (I called my mom up at the time to see what she'd suggest. "Get the palm," she recommended, "because they've been around for millions of years, so it will be hard for you to kill anything that evolved to be so tough.") The front row seats next to the window are given to the pepper plants I grew from seeds acquired at the cafeteria of all places- I started the one on the right at the end of August, and the two on the left in early October.

The next immediate question, of course, is what's with that odd-looking shelf they're sitting on? Originally the plants were all sitting on that windowsill in the picture but they kept getting knocked off when I closed the curtains, so I decided to build a nice shelf for them a few weeks ago. I, ahem, commandeered the wood from the discarded scrap in the physics shop which is why it has holes in it- beggars can't be choosers! For the legs I raided my bookcase, which is filled with these lovely thick physics textbooks that I need to hold onto but only use for reference perhaps once a semester, in which case I can temporarily dismantle said shelf until I find what I need and then reassemble it. All in all this works great on two levels because it leaves much-needed free space on my bookshelf and allows me to quickly disable it when it comes time to move out (because when you move around as much as I do, a concrete piece of furniture is the last thing you need!).

So that's the current plant situation in my room. I might add one or two when the second semester starts (a cactus would be nice, and I used to have this wicked red clover...) because once the snow really flies a bit of green is always appreciated.