Member-only story
Gardening for Dummies
Grow herbs and lettuces indoors this winter even if your neurotic energy kills your houseplants
About four years ago, I visited an elementary school where the main corridors boasted six-foot hydroponic towers spilling over with lettuce and other vegetables. My host informed me that at lunch every day, the students ate salads from produce they grew in the building.
I had not been so excited since Ben and Jerry supplied the snacks at a concert I attended in 1989 and pretty much everyone in the audience was lactose intolerant except for me.
As a failed gardener who had once been advised to plant plastic flowers in my raised beds, I had long ago abandoned hope of growing anything except for mold on forgotten jars of pesto in the back of my refrigerator. But if my host was correct, all I needed to grow produce in these towers was a starter kit, water, and an electrical outlet.
Perhaps, I told myself, this was the solution to my gardening woes.
I was not always such a pessimist about planting. When I was in my early 20s, I fancied myself pretty good at it. I kept my first plant, a peace lily, alive through eight moves in seven years. I even acquired a spider fern to keep it company.
One Christmas vacation, I asked a friend to take care of the lily and the fern. Upon my return I overheard her trash-talking me: “She’s killing her plants with her neurotic Jewish energy.”
She was a Buddhist scholar, not a horticulturist. Still, her observation stung.
My confidence wilted even more several years later when I made my first foray into outdoor gardening. I wanted to grow sweet peas like my mother-in-law. She was generous with advice and supplies. “You’ve got to stake them,” she said, presenting me with a package of pipe cleaners.
I’d never staked anything, and pipe cleaners struck me as an odd choice for a job requiring sturdiness.
“I think I’m doing something wrong,” I told my mother-in-law when the flowers began coming up. “The pipe cleaners won’t go into the dirt, and when they do, they’re all bendy.”
Bless her heart, she did not laugh at me. But that same year my potato crop…
