Plant Pot

Plant  Pot ©

By

Michael Casey

My mother had green fingers as far as her elbow. If she saw a plant she liked she’d steal a cutting from the park where we were on holiday. Then she put it into a plastic bag after sprinkling water on it. A week or nearly two later she’d plant it and it would grow. For anybody else it would die, but for mum it lived.

My brother inherited her green fingers. He actually grew an orange tree from a pip, he only had a balcony 20years ago so he had buckets and stuff as his garden. Once he got a house, he had plants galore and the squirrels and birds came by to enjoy it.

Me I’ve got a couple of pots with shamrock in. Our Aunty Mary from Ballyheigh used to send us Saint Patrick’s badges and shamrock every 17^th March. Then mum must have planted some, so there was an outpost of Kerry right here in Birmingham, shamrock in a pot and in the flower bed too.

Mum used to grow rhubarb  at the bottom of the garden, our cat used to shelter under the leaves when the summer sun was too much for her. Then there strawberries too, rhubarb and strawberries what more could you want. Though I always hated rhubarb, and was not allowed to eat all the strawberries.

A cutting here or a cutting there can brighten up a garden, or a pot in a corner of a room. I have a large pot of shamrock  sharing with a green plant with red flowers, don’t ask me the name of the plant, it’s just green with red flowers. It’s pretty so I bought it, a change from a Christmas poinsettia. It brightens the room.

I did plant the poinsettia in the same pot as the shamrock but it eventually died, so I exhumed it and planted the red flowering thing. My brother would know the name and so on, but if it’s pretty that’s all that matters.    

The girls got seed planting kits from their uncle, the same brother, so we had to do that on the living room coffee table, which is also the family dining table. So we put old newspaper down first, then you cut out all the instructions and make labels on a stick, so you’ll know what’s in each pot.

Once the labels are ready you have to put the cocoanut husks in order, then put the compost is each pot. Watering is then done, rather like a priest baptising a child.  In this case just compost.  It expands before your very eyes. 

The labels are planted, then and only then the seeds are added and buried in the compost.

“When will they grow,” the girls badger me, so I tell them it’ll be a few weeks. So they put 2 plant pots on the windowsill in their room. I take the 3^rd and put it on my windowsill. The girls complain that my windowsill is South facing and theirs is North facing. I offer to swap pot put they don’t fall for that trick.

Its weeks later now and I have won the race,  I have sweet pea growing in my pot. It’ll be a few weeks more before their pots have anything growing.

As I said at the start our mum had green fingers all the way to her elbow. When mum died she still grew plants after her death. She must have sneaked up to my sister’s house and planted daisies. A few weeks after her funeral they appeared  in my sister’s front garden. Fragrance  and love from mum.