Accidental Gardening

Last year I bought an amazing petunia hanging planter from the Farmers Market in Syracuse.  It became my kind of zen garden I took to pruning and watering every day when I got home from work.  I would pick all the dead heads off the plant and prune back the dead branches.  Since I had one flowering plant at the time, I could manage it to this level.  When the fall came, we brought all the plants inside, including the dead carcass of what was my petunia plant.  It spent the winter inside with all it's dead branches hanging around above a bookcase.  Why do you ask?  Well because I was lazy, forgot about it and then it became scenery and I stopped noticing.

Fast forward to this spring, around May/June.  When we moved, we set almost all of the plants outside on the back deck immediately.  We really had to place to put them inside and sunshine would be good for all of them.  This included my hanging basket of dead petunia parts.  I had gotten it in my head that I would finally deal with the dead plant here because I had room and a yard.  Let's just say that didn't happen.  The spring rains came and dowsed all the plants and they began to thrive.

Then I noticed the hanging basket started to get all kinds of little green dots on it.  It wasn't mold, but growth of some sort.  I thought, well that's odd, I wonder what kind of weeds I am going to get.  In the spirit of letting nature take it's course, I would throw water on it while I was out watering the other plants and then one day, I saw the most remarkable thing.  A petunia bud!  What in the world?!  Apparently when I brought them inside last fall, it prevented them from freezing, so they basically re-seeded themselves and began anew this year!  How delightful lazy gardening can be!