The world is full of ironies. For example you would expect someone with a degree in Agriculture (with a PhD to boot) to be good at growing and raising plants. But it doesn’t always follow.
Agriculture has always fascinated me even as a child. I love plants but they don’t love me back. I have killed a dozen indoor cacti either from giving them too much water or otherwise. I tried growing a tomato plant on a pot and the poor thing just grew like a beanstalk and stopped. No flowers, no fruits, just a tomato beanstalk. While a potted Cordyline, an ornamental native to the tropics, survived, but eventually just turned stiff and has not produced a single new shoot since it was planted. A Pepperomia also refused to grow after I subdivided it and changed the potting media.
I’ve had a few successes though. Recently I was able to make a rose cutting grow some shoots. However my jubilation was short lived when the lady gardener I hired to clean up my yard pulled the whole thing out and tossed it into the rubbish bin. A sweet basil plant I was carefully tending to was starting to flourish and produce more succulent shoots when it suffered the same fate as my rose plant. This time courtesy of another lady gardener, &^%@@##!!!. Goodbye to my Thai curry.
I am disappointed partly at myself but I think I am more disappointed with the people to whom I have entrusted the job of looking after my backyard. But what can you expect? Ornamental gardening isn’t a big thing here in PNG so that simple folks like my lady gardeners somehow can’t tell the difference between a weed and a plant! A patch of lemon grass growing nearby was slashed and uprooted by my neighbour’s trigger-happy bush-knife wielding hired labour. So there you go.
Agriculture has always fascinated me even as a child. I love plants but they don’t love me back. I have killed a dozen indoor cacti either from giving them too much water or otherwise. I tried growing a tomato plant on a pot and the poor thing just grew like a beanstalk and stopped. No flowers, no fruits, just a tomato beanstalk. While a potted Cordyline, an ornamental native to the tropics, survived, but eventually just turned stiff and has not produced a single new shoot since it was planted. A Pepperomia also refused to grow after I subdivided it and changed the potting media.
I’ve had a few successes though. Recently I was able to make a rose cutting grow some shoots. However my jubilation was short lived when the lady gardener I hired to clean up my yard pulled the whole thing out and tossed it into the rubbish bin. A sweet basil plant I was carefully tending to was starting to flourish and produce more succulent shoots when it suffered the same fate as my rose plant. This time courtesy of another lady gardener, &^%@@##!!!. Goodbye to my Thai curry.
I am disappointed partly at myself but I think I am more disappointed with the people to whom I have entrusted the job of looking after my backyard. But what can you expect? Ornamental gardening isn’t a big thing here in PNG so that simple folks like my lady gardeners somehow can’t tell the difference between a weed and a plant! A patch of lemon grass growing nearby was slashed and uprooted by my neighbour’s trigger-happy bush-knife wielding hired labour. So there you go.
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