CrazyCatLady Column: Geek Safe Pet Suggestion – PLANTS
So let’s talk plants. I normally enjoy my pets for the furry, meowing, clawy goodness that they bring with them, but active pets that require food and poopzones are not for everyone. Sometimes you need to dial it back a bit and just stick with a nice geranium.
Walking cat on leash: difficulty level 8+
Geranium watering: difficulty level -1, unless you’re really forgetful.
A lot of people are at peace with the fact that pets underfoot is just not for them. I had a piano teacher back in the day who had a whole collection of plants in his house rather than have any pets, and it worked out well as he was one of those forgetful professory types. I think perhaps he had a cat once, but that it realized the neglect during piano-time was not a one-off thing and it wandered on over to the neighbors. He had a great burglar-proof setup, what with all the cacti below every windowsill. Anyone trying to gain entrance to his home would have promptly had a butt full of needles.
Cacti are great beginner ‘pets’ too. Can’t trust junior with a goldfish? Roll him back to a cactus. Sprinkle a little water on that puppy once a month and you’re good to go. Can’t handle that? Well, no puppy this year then.
And then there’s the gardening freaks. Everyone’s got at least one in their neighborhood. Usually he or she is about 65, has an affinity for light blue coveralls, and if you have a nut tree in your yard, they’ll trade you shit loads of cucumbers for whatever they can pick. We had duelling old man gardeners in my neighborhood growing up. One grew massive lemons on two trees in his front yard. I’m talking the size of your FACE lemons. They were like Nerf footballs after your dog got ahold of them and gnawed the paint off. Of course I’d prefer massive lemons to the freaking mutant lemons that people are growing more fond of posting pictures of. Here, let me be the next person to freak you out with a mutant lemon.
It’s got tentacles!! I blame Japan.
Something about those things is just not right. But anyway, so yes, there was lemon guy. But right next door to lemon guy was cucumber and bees guy. Now cucumber and bees guy had a full of garden plot behind his house, and aside from cucumbers and bees, he had tomatoes, and chilis, and a couple of normal fruit trees (lemon guy did not approve, all fruit in his house was gargantuan I assume). Bit of advice to the gardener types: vegetables don’t sting, killer bees do. We always assumed that lemon guy got his final comeuppance against cucumber and bees guy by sabotaging the beehives with a less than nice strain of Africanized bees. It was pandemonium on our quiet block that week.
There is a nice middle to be achieved here though. There is the guy who specializes in growing the hottest chilis he can find seeds for. And there is the guy who breeds his own catnip. And there’s the guy who sets up his closet to be a grow house (ssssshhhhh). And the girl who buys the $90 piece of junk to grow herbs in her highrise condo window. We’re kind of lucky how many options there are for urban gardening these days.
Or you can get your japanese on and buy a bonsai from that creepy dude with the van who parks on the vacant corner. He’s got some sweet zebra print cow skins.
The only thing more japanese is square watermelons. And we all know what path that leads down…
Nono, not tentacle melon porn. Refrigerated melon buggies.
YOU WIN AGAIN JAPAN!
