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.
