What I Lack in Ability, I Make Up In Relentless Optimism.

33. Eat well-grown food from healthy soil.
81. Plant a vegetable garden if you have space, a window box if you don’t.

This seems like an appropriate rule upon which to ruminated this week, seeing as I just planted a garden for the first time in my entire life.

I don't have any pictures of my garden yet, so here's a picture of Sol Harvest Farm, where Ric gave me my plants. It's so pretty!

But I'm totally terrified.

You've got to understand this about me: I have a baffingly black thumb. No, you know what? Black doesn't even begin to describe it; it's as though somebody lit my thumb on fire, left the charred remains and then asked me to garden with it.

Once in my apartment back in New York, in a fit of productivity, I asked my friend Monica to give me a few of her plants to liven up my cramped living space. Monica, a permaculture expert, had so many plants in her in apartment, it was practically a greenhouse. "Be careful what you give me, though," I warned her. "I'm REALLY bad with plants."

"Don't worry!" she said, "I'm giving you my hardiest plants - trust me, they're impossible to kill."

Oh yes. I killed them all.

And if you want to get totally technical, I actually just finished planting a garden for the second time in my life - the first being a week and a half ago, when I somehow managed to kill it all in less than a fortnight.

I have no idea what I did. Did I give them too much water? Too little? Too much direct sunlight or too much shade? Did I transplant them too soon or too late? So I'm massively frustrated, and terrified I'm going to kill my second try in even less time. But, as my dad said, "Well, you can either try again or give up."

So, when Farmer Ric asked me on Monday, after spending the afternoon helping him weed at Sol Harvest, if I wanted a few of his extra plants, I said, "Hell yeah!" Though I did make him promise not to be offended if and when I accidentally kill his nice gifts. (He promised.)

I put the plants in the ground almost immediately, and I've stopped worrying about overwatering (it is the desert after all), and they seem to be doing okay so far. I even bought a soil test to discover my soil is too alkaline ("That's only all the soil in New Mexico," Ric scoffed) and I'm saving my eggshells to grind up in the soil to balance the pH levels. But mostly praying I somehow manage to get it right.

Just cross your fingers that in a month or two you'll be seeing photos of fat, luscious tomatoes and squash and not the withered little stalks of good intentions.