Verticle Thinking

After the gift of four glorious days filled with sunshine and warmer temperatures, the greyness of winter returned this morning with rain and fog. Mondays are hard enough, and like the song says: "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down." At this time of the year I usually get through this dormant season by excitedly awaiting the arrival of my yearly seed catalogs in the mail, and then spending countless hours pouring over them for new products and new ideas for the coming spring. This year, however, there won't be any springtime arriving in my mail box. Allow me to explain.

Last spring my daughter, sensing that I was suffering from gardening withdrawal after moving to my little studio apartment, offered me her yard to play in to my heart's content. I tacked the long neglected landscape like a general planning D-Day. Sadly, this time the enemy won. The soil was so badly depleted, the weeds had roots so deep that they would require a backhoe to get them out, and the ground water, I later discovered, was questionable from years of  chemical dumping from a long abandoned commercial dry cleaning business nearby. I tried growing in pots and containers, but the only thing that grew with any success were the weeds - even the container plants failed to thrive. Since my daughter was renting the house and property, I didn't think it was a wise use of money and resources to tear the whole thing up and try again. Needless to say this gardener was heart-broken.

My daughter, trying to make me feel better, made me a tiny fairy garden to sit on the table next to my desk. The light from that big picture window worked magic on it, or maybe it was because it was my favorite spot in the apartment. Love can grow anything, and my tiny green world grew by leaps and bounds. I have pruned and re-rooted twice since last summer and it all thrives. That's when I started to ask myself if maybe I needed to think "outside the garden box." Perhaps, if I didn't have room to grow outward, I had room to grow vertically. So I started what I came to call vertical thinking. I started researching on the internet and, lo and behold, there is a ton of information about vertical gardening, especially indoors.  With just the addition of a larger table top and some vertical plant holders, I can not only expand my fairy garden, but put in some herbs and flowers as well.

So now, instead of looking for seed catalogs in the mailbox, I'm looking for inspiration online. I'm not only thinking outside the box, I'm thinking the sky's the limit. What I've learned from all of this is that nothing is written in stone about how to accomplish your dreams. If it's something you're passionate about, open yourself up to the idea that there are infinite possibilities within each and every day, and within each and every situation. Think vertically! Reach for the stars!

And so it is.