It’s Adam’s Fault That I Have a Black Thumb

I Blame My Black Thumb on Adam

I blame my black thumb on Adam. Adam’s sin made God curse the soil, making it impossible for me to grow anything. In Genesis 3:17, God told him, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.”   Thank goodness I don’t have to depend on growing my own food for survival; otherwise, I would starve to death. I’ve spent more money trying to grow a few lousy tomatoes than it would have cost me to buy several bushels of tomatoes at the farmer’s market. So, I’ve given up on raising vegetables. But ornamental plants and flowers are another story.

Despite My Black Thumb, I Still Have the Gardening Bug

Every spring, when pink buds start showing up on my azaleas, and the vines on my fence produce a crop of pretty yellow flowers, I get the gardening bug. I don’t know what the vines are, as I tend to plant things and never remember what kind of foliage I have.  That’s because the items I plant are generally not around long enough for me to get attached to them.  Put another way, I don’t have a green thumb.  What I have is more along the lines of a black thumb.  However, that doesn’t stop me from trying.

Every year I make my annual pilgrimage to the garden center—usually Lowes—where I methodically choose hundreds of dollars’ worth of vegetation to kill.  I am somewhat surprised nobody recognizes me as the plant murderess and throws me out.  Then again, the more plants I murder, the more money I spend.  I go up and down each aisle looking for something that thrives on bad soil and neglect.  Sure, I have good intentions when I start out, but somewhere along the line, my plants don’t get fed or watered unless it rains. Add to that the fact I really don’t know what I’m doing, like the time I planted all the beautiful sun-loving plants in the shade.

Are There No Plants That Thrive on Bad Soil and Neglect?

I look at the plants with the festive blooms.  Nope, I planted them a few years ago, and they all died within two weeks.  Ooh, that one looks pretty.  No, wait, I’ve done that one, too.  By now, I can recognize almost everything that did not do well in my hands, leaving me with little to choose from.  Impatiens are fairly indestructible except when the dog decides to do her business in the flower bed and has to dig to China first.  That doesn’t count as my fault.  I even brought in the hanging pot of begonias the first two times the temperature dipped into the thirties this year, and I managed to keep the cats from eating them.  Unfortunately, on the third cold night I forgot, so there they sit on my porch, their droopy brown bodies a reminder of my failure.  My husband says maybe they will resurrect, but I’m not hopeful.

What Do I Have to Do to Get a Beautiful Flower Garden?

I really should accept my limitations and give up.  But all I know is I want a beautiful garden.  Hiring an expert to help didn’t do any good.  Regardless of explaining (twice) to two different lawn care services that I wanted them to take over and create a colorful masterpiece in my yard, all I got was someone who mowed the thriving weeds twice a month.  So, when February turned into March, the sky became robin’s egg blue with wispy white clouds, the temperature hovered at a balmy 72 degrees, and new plant life was everywhere (except my yard); I felt drawn to the garden store like a moth to the flame.  I couldn’t fight it.  The pull was just too strong—because I just knew this time my efforts to plant and maintain a lovely flower garden would succeed.  You do know the definition of insanity, right?  It’s something about doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.  But this time . . .

Fast forward a couple of months. My petunias are wilted, my coleus droopy, the impatiens are stemmy, and a varmint has gnawed on the hostas. Then I hit upon the perfect solution as God brought this Bible verse to mind: “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”

Wildflowers thrive on poor soil and neglect! Could someone please tell me where to buy wildflowers?