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 I have angered the TERFs, not entirely inadvertently, and, well. Clearly I should have done this earlier in order to draw in more activity to my page.

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One of the garden enthusiasts I follow on tumblr is a devotee of Odin, so this seemed an appropriate day*. I'd soaked the cocopeat on Monday, but yesterday I met my supervisor, and T met our supervisor, and I came off the diet I've been on this last fortnight, and then I realised my bra strap had snapped sometime while I was out, so, uh, we were uncharacteristically busy, is what I'm saying here.

My family at large has always had plants. The house we lived in till I was eight had huge gardens, and my mother's parent had a smaller but still stupidly green one at their place. My father's great-aunts lived in this rambling old house with a wilderness of a garden out front, terraces full of potted plants flowering at random, and at one point a grapevine in the kitchen-garden. This is in Howrah, India, mind you. My mother currently has a roof-garden full of both flowering shrubs and vegetables, and a tiny plot out back, in desperate need of new soil, but valiantly supporting hibiscus and pinwheelflower plants higher than I'm tall.

But I can't grow plants. I really can't. I've been trying for the last several years. The longest I've kept one alive is the bamboo T got as a gift from bigbasket for Diwali, 2016, and even that died after a bit over a year because I left for a fortnight and forgot to give it to my neighbour to water. Admittedly some of the deaths by rotting were helped along by people who decided to (a) over-water my cactus, (b) leave sugar in my tulsi-pot by way of worship, which obviously invited ants along. I have a feeling the same person did both. She has since left the hostel, so fingers crossed it was just her.

So this last January while I was at home I thought I might as well try again, and brought back four tiny pots from home, cause all I see around here are plastic, and I can see those do fine but I am biased in favour of good old-fashioned earthenware. Then I told T, and because she's nothing if not good with a plan, she bought me a sack of potting soil, a bar of cocopeat, and a packet of mint seeds. This was back in February. And then we had stuff going on for a couple months which would have made it irresponsible to start new plants, so the pots sat in their corner with the rest of the stuff and mostly just impeded my ability to open my almari easily.

On Sunday I scrounged tulsi and basil seeds from hostelfolk who garden, so today I set up these three pots.

Plus, and this is one of the things that's been making me want to set this stuff up for months now, I found sandhyamalati, the Four O'Clock flower, growing wild on the way from T's flat to the nearest railway station and filched a few seeds. This is one of the plants my great-aunts used to have in their wilderness, in I think four or five different colours. I've forgotten what colour flowers were on the plant I nicked these seeds from, so I guess that'll be a surprise, but in they went in the last pot I'd brought from home as an extra, in case of breakages.

And now we wait.

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*Neither Odin, nor the Hindu Budha are associated with green and growing things that I know of.