Fairy Stories and Black Thumbs

IT'S A DILEMMA 
I have never ever ever been able to really grow anything, everyone always joked of my black thumb and rightly so. The problem is, I love the idea of having our own garden someday....You know, with beautiful flowers, something pretty climbing a trellis, and some vegetables that can go straight from the garden to our table..........But I don't think that's likely...at least not with me in charge. ;-)

A MAGICAL HISTORY
When I was a little girl, there was this woman whose garden I used to visit. She was a little strange you could say and did things like read your Tarot cards and decoupage her walls with flowers cut from magazines instead of using wallpaper. She was also terribly nice and as a child I thought she was positively magical. Her garden was the most beautiful garden I think I have ever seen, she called her Fairy Garden.

As I traipsed around the cobblestone path delighting over the little stone pond with flower shaped candles and the overwhelming amount of color coming from all the blooms around me, or as I sat kicking my bare feet off the edge of her pretty little backyard swing, she'd tell me the Fairy Stories.

Her garden was soo beautiful because the fairies lived there right under our noses and helped her to tend it. Fairies love all things beautiful and took pride in adding their magical touch to all of the living things in a garden made safe for them. They only come out at night you see, and the trick to making them feel welcome is to devote an area in the garden to some nice soft moss so that the fairies can rest their tired feet after they flit about all night. This is very important because if you invite the fairies in and you don't have the moss or something happens to it, the fairies will get angry and think you tricked them and that will be the end of your lovely magical garden.

If you were good to the fairies and took good care of them, they would one day hide a magical golden key somewhere in the garden. This key would unlock the most beautiful fairy treasure of them all, but it's very rare and hard to find. Once in this very garden we sat in, a little boy who came to visit had found the key! But, he had foolishly lost it before realizing it's importance and no one had ever seen it again.
________________________________________________________________________________

Thus, I became obsessed with having a Fairy Garden of my own. :-) Grandma let me plant a few things around a birdbath in her backyard. Among other things, I had some pansies and some chives, and of course...some moss. :-) Unfortunately, this pursuit soured on me as I began in little girl fashion to get bored with the constant attention my little Fairy Garden required and eventually everything died...including the moss.....Having angered the Fairies so and then later developing allergies to practically everything, that was my last large attempt to enter the world of gardening. Maybe I'd been cursed. ;-)

Now however, as I again see the advantages of having a garden someday I had decided recently to have a go at a potted plant to brighten up the apartment and begin again at trying to keep something green alive. I had NO IDEA where to start. So, one day I picked up a little starter kit...FOR CHILDREN. The idea was to grow clover. The kit came with a pretty little ceramic bowel in the shape of a clover, some peat pellets, some clover seeds, and some simple instructions. It says ages 5+...How hard can it be right?! I totally got this!..................

ANGRY FAIRIES HAVE LONG MEMORIES
To make this increasingly long story a little bit shorter I only got two clovers (out of like 50 seeds) to sprout, then one died....then the other died...all before the little green leaves fully unfurled. Now I have a pretty little clover shaped bowel with some dirt in it...Whoopeee....All in all a rather pathetic attempt....My husband says that my problem is constant watering. Because I don't care for the taste of water and have a hard time remembering to consume enough, it may be twice as hard to remember to use that water for something else as well....say to water my sad little plant. In any case, my black thumb has struck again......

Hmmmm...maybe I should buy some kind of cactus...Ooooh or an Aloe Vera! Come to think of it, I had one of those in my room as a kid and I probably watered that sucker 3 times in 8 years and it was pretty hearty...not to mention quite useful. Now that's a thought. :-)