I try some "simple gardening", screw up, and make a mess

I started out the day with such high hopes.

Having Sunday and Monday off instead of the traditional Saturday/Sunday weekend has actually turned out to be great. I get a ton done in the office on Saturdays when I am one of the only people in the building, and on Mondays, I can Accomplish 10,000 Things! At least, that's what I think every Sunday when I start planning for my day off.

I decided that today I would start my garden. I was so excited I could barely sleep. I got up, finalized my shopping list, and headed out to the local Ace Hardware. Sometimes those huge home improvement stores just wig me out and I feel lost, and a bit like a fraud since I am not buying any j-channel or PVC pipe or windows. The Ace stores in Chicago always felt a bit more like a local home-and-garden store, so decided to give the nearby Raleigh outpost a go. And I immediately knew I was in trouble. Not only were the clerk ladies knowledgeable, friendly, and encouraging, but they both are on Pinterest, and we started swapping pin-spired ideas all over the place.

And so I ended up spending a lot more than I had planned. As usual.

I bought a couple of packets of organic seeds, a couple of mid-sized containers, some various gardening implements, and 2 bags of soil. One organic bag for edibles, and one regular bag for the peony and dahlia bulbs. (Ok, I know I really don't have any business spending resources like water and cash on peonies and dahlias. But I just.couldn't.help.myself. So we'll see how that goes. I have a plan.)

Anyway. I also bought this thing called "The Simple Garden". I thought that this would be a good way for me to gain some confidence, learn a bunch from the included guidebook, and start some seeds indoors. The external packaging made it look foolproof. I should have known better.

Cute, compact, fairly eco.

I should have realized that planting seeds from a guidebook is more like baking a cake than like microwaving a TV dinner, but in my enthusiasm to get started I failed to read through the entire instruction manual before beginning. I just started with Step 1 and careened carelessly to Step 2 and 3 without so much as a glance forward. Which is how I ended up flooding the kitchen table with about a gallon of warm water and ruining my first try at loosening the potting medium.

Potting medium in the bottom of the growing pot.

It's hard to tell from this picture, but I had stupidly placed the whole container on the table so I could work it from a comfy height. You also cannot tell from this pic that the little plastic tray that is supposed to catch any overflow of water is actually a separate piece of plastic that just snaps on to the bottom. So when I started pouring the warm water over the medium to "watch it expand to 10X its original size!" it didn't dawn on me that I was essentially pouring a gallon of water onto my kitchen table. Because it didn't absorb right away. It filled up around it, and into the overflow pan, and gloriously and shockingly all over the table in a flash. I'm really happy I had rested my DSLR on a box rather than directly on the table top.

I decided it would be wise to move the operation to the sink. And there with the help of the sink sprayer, I was able to really watch the soil become a potfull.

Neat.

 The next step was to plant the seeds. The kit came with cherry tomatoes and basil seeds, and this nifty spacing guide and seed-sticker-inner. Since I didn't read any farther than the next step, I gleefully put the seeds in their color coded spaces and tamped them down with the seed pusher.

Fun!

The next step revealed that you are really only supposed to plant one kind of plant in the container at a time, not all of them all together. Blast. I had thought that that was part of the point of a fun space saving container kit - plant complementary plants next to each other to maximize space and resources. WRONG! Nope. Straight up wrong. But the tiny seeds were already nestled into the dirt, and I didn't know how I could possibly retrieve them, so I just went on to the next step. I figured I could gently transplant some of them when they started to come up.

IF they come up. Because the last step of the instructions is to "cover your Simple Garden with the clear plastic Simple Garden Dome (not included) to start the germination of your newly planted seeds"*. Yeah. Hum. Didn't get a dome. Didn't do any kind of seed starting. I kinda thought that was the point of the kit.

Ugh.

Well, I put the pot in the sunniest indoor window we have, wished them luck, and decided to call it a day.

At least it is kind of cute.

I learned several valuable lessons today.

1. If you do not know anything about gardening, it is best to read all the instructions before plunking your seeds in the dirt.
2. There is a reason why a bajillion pinners have pinned a bajillion DIY seed-starter instructions. Apparently, seeds work better when you start them off with some training dirt/some kind of cover before tucking them in to their home dirt. 
3. Gardening is not that simple, not matter what the elegantly packaged starter kit tries to tell you.

And so I end my day off with a little bit of far fetched hope and a cute little plastic bowl full of seeds. I think I would have been better off starting out with seedlings, but what's the fun in that?

* The quotes from the guidebook are not actually quotes. They are more like paraphrases because I am too lazy to get up and get the guidebook. But you get the idea.