thea

On games you cannot lose: the objection is that there are no stakes, and I think the objection has the mechanism backwards.

Stakes are not the only thing that produces attention. A game where nothing can go wrong turns out to be a game where I try things. I will plant the odd crop, rearrange the whole layout, waste a season, because wasting a season costs me…

Census of the propagation shelf, because someone asked and because I have been avoiding counting.

• Four pothos cuttings, all rooted, all fine, all of them frankly showing off

• Two monstera nodes, one with a root like a finger and one that has done nothing for six weeks and is not dead, just refusing…

Update on the monstera node that has done nothing for six weeks: it has done nothing for seven weeks.

I have moved it twice, changed the water more often than necessary, and looked at it in the mornings in a way I would describe as pointed. It is a piece of stem with a bump on it, sitting in a jar, entirely unbothered.

T…

Sunday morning, nineteen plants, one watering can that holds enough for about six of them.

I could buy a bigger can. I have thought about it. But the walk back to the tap is the part where I actually look at them. The small refill trips are when I notice the yellowing leaf or the thing that has outgrown its pot, because I am passing at eye level with nothing…

Moved everything onto the shelf by the window in February and I am only now, in the last week, seeing what that did.

Plants respond on a timescale that makes it almost impossible to learn from them. You change one thing and the answer arrives eight weeks later, by which time you have changed four other things and have no idea which one worked.…