M is for Malarkey

I tell stories. Frivolous stories full of unapologetic malarkey and hyperbole. I have been doing this all my life.

When I was little, as my family would sit down to dinner, I would be asked one simple, almost insignificant question: What did you do today, Heather.

Without a second of hesitation I would launch into a detailed description about my day interspersing actual occurrence with snippets of malarkey just to see how far I could take the tale. Nine times out of ten, I was encouraged to spin the tale out further beyond what I could have readily imagined. 

Oh how I wish I had a record of the stories I told. Looking back, I’m sure not a single one of them made sense and my siblings only tolerated my shenanigans because I was the baby of the family.  My childhood was fantasy wrapped in delusion filled to the brim with malarkey.

Today, I still tell wild stories full of malarkey. Just ask the girls about the orangutans that I blame for everything. Or Scott. Poor Scott. Last night while we sat at dinner, a thunderstorm rolled overhead with flashes of lightening and great booms of thunder that shook the windows in their frames. As we ate, I bemoaned the fact that we left my newly purchased bags of soil – the ones for the raised garden bed I’m building – out on the lawn. Unprotected. Scott and the girls looked at me incredulously.

“It’s dirt,” Scott said.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “But it’s my dirt now and I should take better care of it.”

“What are you going to do once you put it in the garden?” He asked.

I looked at him like he was the crazy one, “Put umbrellas over it, obviously.”

Like I said. Malarkey.

Malarkey is a noun from the 1930s that means nonsense.

Example: Marty the Magnificent managed to mumble the magic word making Melvin the Mouse move. “What malarkey!” Marcus moaned at the meager maneuver. 

This post has been brought to you by the Letter M and the fine folks at Blogging A to Z. And by the number 566. Check out more A to Z blogs here!

Poor Amaryllis

Recently I got it in my head that I needed to garden. I had purchased a few bags of potting soil intending to repot my lime tree and a few other plants that had gotten too big for the britches...I mean pots.

Let me backtrack just a bit...you see, I can't garden. Or rather, I'm learning to garden and the plants tend to giggle and scoff at my attempts. But a long while ago when we bought the townhouse we discovered that the previous owner left a multitude of potted plants on the back patio. Instant garden that I completely and utterly ignored. Way back then I had no interest in plants. And because I am lazy to boot, I left the containers right where they were and went about setting up house. A month or so later as spring fully arrived, I was delighted to find that one of the planters had some pretty flowers blooming. I was soon to discover via my mother's wisdom, the huge flowers were in fact amaryllis. I didn't know I like them. Turns out I do. I loved those flowers something fierce.

I know they're hard to see here, but I combed through every photo I had looking for a decent shot of the flowers. Apparently I never actually took just a picture of them. They were caught here in behind the girls during a Easter morning pinata frenzy!

Again, hard to pull out clear details, but I had pink, red, and white flowers.

Oh how little my angels were. These are circa 2009 three years after we moved in.

Despite my love for the plant, I took a strict hands off approach to my care. Sure, during the dry months I threw some water on them occasionally. Once in a while I pulled out the dead leaves, debris, and weeds that clogs around the bulbs. Ninety percent of the time this is what the container looked liked:

When we moved in 2011, I dumped every other container of soil out and took just the pots with us. Except the amaryllis. Those I left alone. I made Scott take a special trip back to the old house just to pick them up because I wanted to keep them.I swore up, down, left, and right that I would become a gardener. I had space now to do so and I knew I could take care of my amaryllis.

And I did.

Sort of.

Here is last Easter. I hid an egg in the amaryllis. See how tall and filled out they are? Those four blooms - two full and two just getting ready to bloom - were the only ones I saw last year. This year? After the autumn dying barely any of the bulbs had any growth at all.

Sure there's some weeds in there...but that adds nutrients and junk, right?

Jump back to last week and my grand plans for repotting. I decided to repot the amaryllis thinking that the bulbs weren't doing well because they were overcrowded. Overcrowded is a massive understatement. My careful neglect over the years had led to nearly two dozen bulbs in that tiny container.

As I was pulling them apart, being exceptionally careful with the roots, I noticed that every single bulb was, to varying degrees, splotched with red spots and patches. I was fairly sure that this was not a normal thing so onto the interent I went to find an answer. In all of the pages I searched mention of a bulb killing fungus that made the Audrey 2 look nice was made but I could find no photos of this dreaded disease.

Where the internet fails, elderly neighbors prevail. I took one of the bulbs and marched across the street where last year, I knew, a gazillion amaryllis bloomed in carefully planned reckless disarray. Mrs. Elderly Neighbor took one look at the bulb I carried and I swear she might have reached for a cross to ward me off!

"Oh, my!" she said as I held it out to her.

"So...that's bad, right?" I asked still just a bit hopeful that my amaryllis could be saved.

"I would say so." She shook her head, "Nothing to do for it. Get rid of all the bulbs and dirt."

"The dirt too?"

"Yes," she said, "it's all been infected."

I sighed, thanked her gratefully, and trudged back to the house to dispose of the bulbs. Stupid things can't even go into the compost.

A pile of bulbs and roots. In the top left of the mass of bulbs you can see one clearly discolored.

But as I was going through them I found three bulbs that only had a couple of little red spots on them. I smiled and pulled out three half-gallon pots. With new soil and individual containers, maybe, just maybe, I'll get a few blooms and I can try to save the seeds and start again.

Meet the Good-ryllis: Angelo, Frankie, and Vinnie. Yeah. I named them after mobsters but it's okay because they're deadly.

Assuming, of course, that the fungus won't affect the seeds.

Heart of Flame

We have a zoo membership to the local zoo and as much as I love the antics of the animals and listening to the keeper chats (seriously, Cyra can give her own keeper chats about the bald eagles and has, on many occasion, corrected zoo visitors she overhears talking about the eagles. Obnoxious, yes. But also so freaking cute).

But the zoo is also a botanical garden and every spring the gardens burst with such fantastic colors and flowers, I often spend more time taking photographs of the flora rather than the fauna.

This past weekend, the girls and I went to the zoo with Cyra's Girl Scout troop. Ashleigh and I lagged behind quite a bit and often got sidetracked which happened to be a very good thing because otherwise I would never have found this:

This is a Heart of Flame. It is a South American flower which is weird because it was planted in the Africa section of the zoo.

And it is so very orange!

As a new gardener, I am finding that I am more fascinated than I ever was by flowers. And I must have one. Or three. Or twelve. They make me smile all over my face they are so bright and orange and cheerful! And also slightly pointy and spiny.

Pickleworms?!?! WTF!

So remember how braggy I was the other day about my awesome garden? I was all conceited and proud.

Oh how I have fallen.

My beautiful cucumbers are gone. So very. very. gone. Because of a stupid moth and its offspring! Remember that scene in Wrath of Khan where Kirk screams "KHAAAAANNNNN!"

Yeah. That's how I feel right now. Thwarted by a stupid moth. And BABIES!

All the sites and books pretty much say the same thing - once infested there goes your crop!

That is grody.

Many of the vines and all of the fruit had this inside.

My friends, The Pickleworm!

This one, and the one behind it I had hope for when I first spotted them! Oh how my idealism has fallen!

All those little green pellets? POOP!!! Not only did they eat my cucumbers, they pooped in them!

PICKLLLEEEEWOORRRRMMMMM!!!!!

Potting and Plotting

In the old house, I had a bunch of flower pots left over from the previous woman who lived there. One pot, had a bunch of amaryllis bulbs in it that every year bloomed faithfully even though I didn’t ever do anything for them except occasionally pulling a few weeds out. The other pots pretty much just had weeds.

I kept them around because even though I do not consider myself a gardener or a person who can actually keep a plant alive, I know how much large ceramic garden pots can cost.

I always figured that someday, I might just be ambitious enough to start a container garden.

Someday.

If scientists ever create genetically modified flowers that are indestructible.

In any case, when we got ready to move back to the St. A. I decided to take the empty pots with me. The house we found to rent has nearly 2 acres with it and the Girls were excited to have space to plant a vegetable garden.

Knowing my propensity to kill green things, I opted to wait before digging into a garden and do research. (It is one of the things I miss most about being a slacker college kid)

While I research the girls bounce around me begging for a garden.

“Okay,” I tell them, “but we will start small with what we have.”

While Ashleigh was off frolicking on a GS trip, Cyra and I wandered around Home Depot picking flowers solely on prettiness factor and color. Luckily, most of them turned out to like sunshine (we get a lot here!) and I eventually figured out the difference between a perennial and an annual (remember, black thumb over here!).

And people, I totally have a garden!


Red one.



It's a pink one! We also got the same kind in a dark pink and white!



It's a purple one!



Firecracker Flower



Some type of Daisy



Balloon Flower - Cyra's Favorite



All planted and ready for the Sun!



The ease of which these plants went into the pots makes me almost confident about a larger garden down the line. Now let's see if we can keep them alive...

A Sign of Spring

In my backyard — I mean on my patio — I have a small patch of dirt. Every spring Ashleigh and my mom attempt to get something to grow there. Key word here: attempt. Nothing ever grows! The soil is poor and the area is flooded almost daily with a sprinkler that has a mind of its own. So imagine my surprise, when I went out to fill the bird feeder today, at what I found:

My little bit of earth. Notice anything interesting?

A grape hyicinth. (I had to look up what it was--I didn't even know those got planted!)

Almost ready to bloom.

A new bud.

Good growing little flowers! I hope that I don't inadvertently kill you all by acknowledging your existence.