You know how sometimes posts are nice and timely? Like, Valentine’s Day gift ideas posted a solid three weeks pre-Valentine’s Day? Spring break outfit suggestions posted right around the time you’d like to start shopping for a new swimsuit? Et cetera?
Well, this post is the opposite of that. Because if you do what I suggest doing in this post at this particular moment in time, the result will be death. (This is less foreboding than it sounds; we’re talking about Plant Death, not You Death.)
Anyway.
Here is my pot. It’s broken, as you can see. But the rosemary plant inside somehow survived the tumble off of our wall, and so – despite all that prior evidence suggesting that what I do with plants is typically the opposite of keep them alive – I decided I was going to try to save it.
My plan: to repot it in a mason jar to create an indoor herb garden that would last us through the winter (I also grabbed some of the parsley from another pot of ours that broke for no discernible reason – seriously, one day it was just sitting there on a ledge, and the next day it was also just sitting there on a ledge, except for it was broken).
This was my goal: a happy little plant with a lovely, functional drainage system that would enable it to survive until it could be returned to the outdoors come spring.
The technique I used is actually a good one, and has worked for me in the past, as you can see above (that’s a hanging herb planter I made a few months ago; click here for instructions). The key is just to place a bunch of rocks in the bottom of the jar before adding the soil and plant, so that the soil doesn’t get waterlogged.
And so Kendrick and I repotted. Rocks, soil, plant.
I was extremely hopeful about this little experiment, not because of the accessibility of wintertime herbs (because I’m not actually a fan of rosemary, although parsley is kind of nice to have on hand), but rather because the repotted plants had these very cool, sort of architectural shapes to them and I thought they looked neat sitting on our windowsill.
And then?
They died.
The problem, you see: as I learned (and then forgot) when I was researching this post about how to grow plants from cuttings (which did end up working; the cuttings we planted are coming along rather nicely), what you need if you’re going to do this are healthy plants with nice little intact roots, not sad little icicles. And our whole repotting experiment took place in November, so sad little icicles is what we had.
Oops.
#diyfail
