The glory of a garden

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I spent a significant part of the morning tending to gardening tasks. I had started some zinnia seeds in a pot and seemingly all of them sprouted so I had to thin them out. I had gone to Home Depot a couple days ago and gotten another larger pot and a bag of potting soil so I decided to have at it before the heat of the day set in. The seeds had come with this tiny little terra cotta pot which had some kind of growing mixture compressed in a pellet the size of a large tablet. You put the pellet in the miniature pot and add water so the "soil" expands and then you put in 5 seeds. Well, the thing is way too tiny for supporting one plant let alone five so I had to transplant those also. The interesting thing is that the seeds I sprouted in the little pot on the window sill took longer to germinate (like a week) and the sprouts are twice as tall as the ones I started in a pot outdoors which germinated practically overnight. I can't wait for the plants to get tall enough to actually start flowering. We had some severe cold this past winter and half of my flowering plants died (which is a lot because I only had two other plants, aloe and basil.) My hibiscus already produced one flower this spring and it is starting to bud up again. My garden basically consists of a few potted plants arranged around my tiny little front porch. It's not much but it's such a welcoming sight to come home to the flowers after dealing with work or to me greeted by them first thing in the morning. It's as if I forget they are out there until I open the door and it's a nice surprise all over again each time, especially when the ginger is blooming. The white flowers smell so sweet and wonderful. I'd like to get some lavender and a gardenia and maybe some Jasmine. Of course by the winter I'll have to build some kind of makeshift green house because merely covering the plants didn't help last time. Unfortunately the stray cats in the neighborhood have been using my driveway (which is in front my door and garden) as a litter box and I spent part of the time watering down and covering cat poop. (Ugh!) It was getting hot by the time I was done with everything so now I am cooling off in front of the fan. (Next stop: reorganizing the storage unit.) HAGD!