Plants
M is a big fan of plants. She perhaps two dozen plants that spend the summers outside on either the screened porch or on the ground, depending on their sun tolerance. During colder weather, they migrate "south" (inside) into our Florida room. That room is the only room on our first floor that consistently gets decent amounts of sunlight in the winter due to its many windows, although it can also be bit chilly because of that.
The only one of these plants I have any emotional attachment to is a Christmas Cactus that I bought for her back in 2017. It actually lived in my house before M did, which makes it the only plant that I've ever kept alive for any sustained length of time. When it was smaller it hung out on the windowsill above my kitchen sink through at least December 2017. I can confirm that date, because that year it had the appropriate number of blooms to post a picture to FB for the second night of Hanukkah. Since then the Christmas cactus got too big for window sill, so M repotted it and it joined the rest of the jungle in the Florida room / outdoors migration. That does mean it's ongoing survival is now because of M, not me.
M actually likes plants enough that she put a nice plant stand on our wedding registry. It supplements an old end table that M repainted and a selection of hooks and macrame pot holders that live on the porch. Her family gave her another three tiered corner plant stand for a holiday present last year. I put it together last night to really kickstart this year's migration outside. Of course, when we run out of stands we have a plenty of ground to put the plants on as well.
This doesn't include plants that were put IN the ground - two years ago M planted a bunch of bulbs outside the fence, which mostly seem to have survived to this point. They supplement the various flowering plants that were already in the yard when I bought the house. Aside from some tiger lilies, I can't identify most of them, but they are the ones that were hardy enough to survive my benign neglect over the years.
M has plans for the rest of the yard at some point. I'll pretty much go for anything I don't have to work hard to maintain, as yard work is quite possibly my least favorite part of home ownership. I enjoy raking leaves in cool weather, and that's about it. I've long said that I'll consider myself to be rich when I can afford to pay someone to mow my lawn, and really I should extent that to include all my yard work. I'm not going to pave over my yard with astro turf... but I understand the temptation.
The only one of these plants I have any emotional attachment to is a Christmas Cactus that I bought for her back in 2017. It actually lived in my house before M did, which makes it the only plant that I've ever kept alive for any sustained length of time. When it was smaller it hung out on the windowsill above my kitchen sink through at least December 2017. I can confirm that date, because that year it had the appropriate number of blooms to post a picture to FB for the second night of Hanukkah. Since then the Christmas cactus got too big for window sill, so M repotted it and it joined the rest of the jungle in the Florida room / outdoors migration. That does mean it's ongoing survival is now because of M, not me.
M actually likes plants enough that she put a nice plant stand on our wedding registry. It supplements an old end table that M repainted and a selection of hooks and macrame pot holders that live on the porch. Her family gave her another three tiered corner plant stand for a holiday present last year. I put it together last night to really kickstart this year's migration outside. Of course, when we run out of stands we have a plenty of ground to put the plants on as well.
This doesn't include plants that were put IN the ground - two years ago M planted a bunch of bulbs outside the fence, which mostly seem to have survived to this point. They supplement the various flowering plants that were already in the yard when I bought the house. Aside from some tiger lilies, I can't identify most of them, but they are the ones that were hardy enough to survive my benign neglect over the years.
M has plans for the rest of the yard at some point. I'll pretty much go for anything I don't have to work hard to maintain, as yard work is quite possibly my least favorite part of home ownership. I enjoy raking leaves in cool weather, and that's about it. I've long said that I'll consider myself to be rich when I can afford to pay someone to mow my lawn, and really I should extent that to include all my yard work. I'm not going to pave over my yard with astro turf... but I understand the temptation.