First, the good news. The flowering Japanese cherry tree that we planted in the front of the house to replace the crab apple tree is finally budding and putting out leaves and flowers.  Hooray!  For the longest time after we planted it, it just sat there, looking like a dead stick and stubbornly doing nothing, even as all of the other trees in the neighborhood grew leaves and flowered.   It is a slow starter, but at leave it is still alive.

If only the vegetable seedlings that we intended to use in the garden this year were doing so well.

We had the brilliant idea several months ago that we should start seeds and then use those for planting the vegetable garden.  We would save money (as buying the seedlings from Home Depot or Lowes is not cheap) and we would be assured of being able to get exactly what kind of vegetables we wanted.  So we ordered a bunch of seeds, John built a super-cool germination area (that looks remarkably like a chemical hood) in the basement, and we put the seed in the little starter trays and waited.

We didn’t have to wait too long.  They started out so well.  After a little while it became pretty obvious that there wasn’t enough room in the starter trays for them, and that they would need to be re-potted in order to give them more room.

Easter weekend, it was nicer and warm and sunny, so we decided to re-pot everything on the back deck, and also plant some of the little seedlings right away and see how they would do.

They didn’t do so well.  Everything that we re-potted and planted died.  And almost everything that we re-potted and took back inside died also.  The only exceptions were two ancho chili seedlings and three zucchini seedlings.  I guess that the re-potting was just too much of a shock to their root systems.

Lesson learned.  We may try starting seeds again next year, but we will start them out in the large biodegradable pots instead of in the too-small plastic trays.

This year we will once again be going to Home Depot for seedlings.  We will probably try re-planting the garden in another week or two.

I have never been one of those flexible kids.  Those cheerleader types.  The ones who can turn a perfect cartwheel, handspring, or backflip.  Who can drop down into the splits and then roll up effortlessly into a headstand.

The splits will probably remain forever out of my reach.

However.  After three years of yoga, at the age of almost-36, I can finally do a headstand.

And I don’t even need a wall behind me, ‘just in case’.