Growing Up and Out

Look carefully and these two pictures of the same cactus. There is a difference of time of about 15 months. Did you notice the difference? Hard to believe it could have grown so much, isn’t it? It’s taller than I am now. See at the left it was slightly taller than our railings, and now, well it’s way above them.  Once I moved it in the sun where it gets late afternoon sunlight and also gets rain as well, and put other plants beneath it, it just went wild.  Last night we cut off one of it’s arms to give to Elly. (By the way, we had a great supper together with dinner made in the slow clooker). That’s how we got our start as well. Someone hacked off an arm and João brought it home and we stuck it in the dirt. I can’t believe it’s grown like this. I’ve even lost count on how many arms it has now. Just recently it put out about 5 new arms just on the top, main branch. The orchid, poinsettia and mint and are also growing like crazy around it.

The funny thing is that the poinsettia was from Christmas and had lost all its leaves, but it still had green stems, so I stuck it outside, cutting back the stalks low and behold it has taken off growing. So I hope to place it in a black garbage bag long about September so it will bloom for Christmas.

The other thing that’s growing in our ginger. We had some ginger root (we always have ginger, for its medicinal effects are wondrous for many things) that got sprouts. Since it’s not all that cheap, I hated to throw it out, so we planted them in a pot of old dirt. And what do you know? Here we are a month later with ginger. I will have to study up to see how long it has to grow before we can harvest it.  I really need to be more intentional about doing plants and flowers. I get so excited about anything that grows.  Maybe, just maybe when we retire in about 10 more years or so, we can have a small house with a small garden. Wouldn’t that be grand?