About five or so years ago I bought my first succulent. It was actually a succulent arrangement with about 4 or 5 different plants and I was SO excited for it. I grew up with my mom growing vegetables in the backyard and beautiful flowers out front, and when I lived in South Philly for a few years I grew my own tomatoes in the little strip of dirt in our back yard and always had fresh basil on hand. So, living in an apartment, I was pretty excited to have SOME sort of green in my life. So, I bought this succulent arrangement at a local farmers market, was so excited for it I named it Georgie and gave him his own prominent place on a shelf in our living room. And then he died.

I gave up on plants for a while after Georgie. I was pretty bummed because I was SO excited about him. I didn’t get excited about plants again until the first spring in our house (we moved into the house in the fall) and I decided I wanted to plant an herb garden. I honestly don’t even remember what type of flowers were in the space where I planned to plant my herb garden, but I felt function over beauty made more sense, and so my obsession with gardening began. It was my first time planting an herb garden and it FLOURISHED! My basil grew to about 4ft tall, and the thyme I planted seems to be more invasive than the mint I stupidly planted in the bed without first researching how invasive it is. The parsley also became MASSIVE; I didn’t even know parsley could grow so big! (Sadly, while it survived last winter, I had to pull it out at the end of this past summer. I had tied it up with twine to the spindles on our porch after we had torrential downpours that knocked it over. It was so top-heavy it couldn’t stand back up without the support and it just didn’t thrive so well after that.)

This past summer I upped the ante; I not only had herbs (basil, rosemary, dill, sage, parsley, thyme, cilantro) but I also planted veggies and some fruit. Not everything was successful; I didn’t get one single eggplant, and my peppers were pretty sad. The chipmunks that live under our shed kept eating all the strawberries. But I DID get the most massive zucchini you’ve ever seen, and I got quite a few butternut squash! I also had some green beans, snap peas, and cherry tomatoes, along with spinach and lettuce. I have HUGE plans for my fruits and veggies this upcoming summer. It includes removing a lot of the decorative plants in the yard, but I really feel like it makes more sense to have a functional back yard as well as a fun space. I just think back to growing up and eating fresh tomatoes and broccoli from the garden, and I really want Jack to grow up with that as well.

Along with my food plants, I decided to venture back into succulents. Since we spend so much time in our back yard in the summer and both my husband and I get at least one bad sunburn a year, I decided to get some aloe. I also got a zebra plant, an echeveria, and a few other succulents I can’t even name. I honestly didn’t even know succulents flowered, yet my echeveria thrived to the point of producing beautiful orange flowers!! I couldn’t believe how well they did. When the weather started to get cold, there was no way I was going to let these little plant babies suffer. We have a deep windowsill in our bedroom that gets amazing light throughout the day, I figured it was a perfect spot to put the plants over the winter. Our cat, Pumpkin, has not been very happy with this arrangement, though, because she loved to sit in the sun on that windowsill, and the plants took up all her space. I’d been checking out hanging planters for a while, and when my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I sent her a link to a design I’d been checking out for a while. I was surprised when the package arrived and she got me two of them!! Which is perfect, because now I have one hanging on either side of the window! There’s plenty of space to still hang some pots across the rod, there are plants still on the windowsill, and there’s enough space for Pumpkin to hang out on the windowsill again if she so chooses.

Since I had quite a few pots to fill for the hangers, even though my plants were doing well, I knew I wouldn’t have enough to fill my pots, so I bought some more and made my own little succulent mixes. My aloe has now gotten too big to be sitting on the windowsill, so it’s in a large container in our dining room now. It was actually growing two pups that I was able to propagate! One is in one of the hanging planters, and the other I am setting aside for a friend whom I’ve promised some succulents to! I’ve also jazzed up the top of the hutch in our kitchen with some string of pearls and some other plants, I have a string of hearts that I am hoping starts to flourish soon, and in my kitchen window I have dahlias, basil, and dill sprouting. I also planted coleus, purple basil, and cilantro, though none of them have sprouted yet. I’m hoping to start tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers soon. The zucchini and butternut squash did so well last year that I’m just going to wait until I am able to plant outside for them.

It’s going to be a lot of work this spring/summer. There are a LOT of plants outside that I want to remove; there’s two small trees and a ton of decorative grasses. They are in the perfect spot to grow cucumbers and tomatoes - and what is a Jersey garden without tomatoes??! I also want to arrange the vegetables I planted last year in a different way. My butternut squash was just in the middle of the garden, but I’m thinking this year it would be neat to put it right up against the built in stone benches and have the trellis as kind of a back to the benches. I think that would be so pretty! I have such high hopes of Jack growing up with homegrown veggies throughout the summer because I was able to grow up with that. I am also hoping to put some more decorative touches in the yard this year. We don’t have a lot of lighting in our yard, so I want to set up string lighting that is anchored on poles in giant barrel planters. I’m debating whether or not I want to try growing berries in those planters, or just do something decorative? I would like to remove this giant island of plants we have out front because it is just not aesthetically pleasing to me and maybe put hydrangeas or azaleas there. We had a ton of pampas grasses out front that I pulled out myself (not something I recommend) and I planted sweet william flowers, which are really beautiful, but I’m not sure if that’s what I want forever.

The saying is so true - once you have a house the projects never end! I have a million ideas for what I want to do with plants in and around the house. And I’m sure once I get it how I think I want it, I’ll change my mind and want to change it again! But I do love having plants in the house. They look nice, a few that I have are air-purifying which is nice, and it just feels like an accomplishment to me to grow something and keep it alive and flourishing. Especially the succulents. All the succulents I have now are to honor Georgie, the poor little guy who didn’t make it. Love ya Georgie, thanks for inspiring me to become obsessed with plants!