One Week Later...

 
A week has passed since I inhumed my carnivorous plants. The pitcher plant shows some signs of life. It appears to be growing a small green fingernail and I can only hope that a hand follows. I’m come to terms with the possibility that the Venus flytrap may be dead. I trimmed the dry, blackened leaves from the stem this morning with a pair of kid scissors, hoping that the pale green stem underneath might contain a spark of life. The prospects are grim, since it didn’t have roots in the first place. I’ll give her another week.

To distract myself from the foreboding abode that my carnivorous terrarium has become, I photographed some of the other plant life occupying my kingdom.

I recently planted my mother’s QVC strawberry plant. It came complete with a bag of pre-grown dormant strawberry plants which I revived with water and the kiss of life. The kit came with Wonder Dirt or Magic Soil, or some sort of synthesized and patented soil which boasted organic components and water-retaining polymers for instant germination and optimum development. I felt skeptical about the soil and researched it extensively on the internet looking for some carcinogenic properties or frog imploding properties. Instead I just found this video for soil wafers. Click.

If anything, this just made me more doubtful. I never found any information besmirching the product, so I planted the industrial strawberries in the plastic soil anyway. I’m sure the plant will produce many lovely strawberries of identical circumference, each with six leaves and fifty-two little yellow seeds. At night, a gnome will come and inject each one with a syringe of Red 40.

When you were little, did you think that food dye was a natural component of fruits and vegetables?

We also got some bleeding hearts. They are my favorite. The name sounds like a song that Dashboard Confessional would write and they kind of look like cocoons full of metamorphosizing Barbie shoes at the moment, but later my devotion to them will make more sense.