DeeDoo’s Digital Scrapbooking Blog

Every Spring I buy several ferns to place in pots on the front porch. I nurse them through the awful heat and baby them all summer long. They grow and get lush and full by summer’s end. They love the early Autumn and cooler temperatures, and that is really when they look their best and seem happiest. But that honeymoon is short-lived around here. Too quickly the temperatures drop to unfriendly lows, and the rays from the sun become dimmer, and once again I have to bring them inside or deal with their immediate demise with the first freeze. And, every year I rescue them from that fate, only to be faced with perhaps a slow death inside from the dry air and less frequent waterings.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to nurture them as well inside, and they inevitably begin to drop dry, dead leaves onto the floor around their pots. Then the dogs and cats pick up the leaves in their fur, or they run through them and scatter them, and very quickly the dropped leaves are distributed far and wide throughout the house. This goes on for weeks, with the ferns dropping more and more leaves and me becoming less and less interested in their survival, until I finally dump them out when they’ve reached the dead, ugly, brown, hanging-on stage.

Today I am debating whether to continue the ritual this year, or dump them now, saving myself the stress. I finally learned to do it with leftovers and other edibles in the refrigerator, and it makes life so much easier. But stuff in the refrigerator is ALREADY dead, whereas the ferns are not. To me that is a big difference. Looks like I’ll be killing them slowly again this year…..bu-wah-ha-ha-ha!!!!