I beg your pardon. I never promised you a herb garden!

But I've grown one anyway.
Brilliant!

You've got to understand what a big deal this is...
My father, who is an avid gardener and lover of all things garden related, has always lamented the fact that my younger brothers and I have never shown any interest in the garden at all. He would often try to inspire us, encourage us and when all else failed he sometimes resorted to outright bribery and finally threats. None of it worked.
Don't get me wrong... I LOVE flowers. Adore them, in fact.
It's the bugs that completely freak me out.
I remember going through a particularly weird (read: "lonely") teenage phase where I decided to adopt a little potted green plant for my bedroom. I called her Wendy and decided that she was going to be my best mate. (If you grew up on movies like Revenge of the Nerds, or anything from that time featuring the Brat Pack, you would also have done weird shit like that. That's what they did in the movies, so that's what we all did. Pet rocks and shit like that.) Well... All went well with little old Wendy for about 2 weeks or so, until the one day I picked her up off the windowsill to "chat" and a giant bug crawled up my arm. I vaguely remember shrieking and FLINGING Wendy across the room. She hit the fridge door and landed in a thousand gritty pieces of wet sand, leaves and stems.
Not good.
And it got steadily worse from there. Once I started work I was determined to join my lady workmates in nurturing a little desk plant with pride and cooing admiration. So I said to myself, I said: "Self, if there's one thing NOBODY can kill it's a cactus; they live out in the desert; they go for months (nay, YEARS!) without water; they're indestructible." WRONG! What followed over the years was a basic mass genocide, a cactus holocaust if you will, as innocent baby cactus after innocent baby cactus perished under my watchful eye. Oh yeah... It was not a pretty sight and not something that I am particularly proud of.
Fast-forward to today and my new living space (with perfect garden area) and a growing obsession with cooking. To be honest, it's been a dream of mine for some time now to have a herb garden, but after my "bad luck" with plants, I was hesitant to add to the death toll. The carnage had to stop!
But lately, as I've matured, I discovered that I was beginning to find the courage to interact with the plant world again. So I got my dad to pot a few herbs for me. Nothing to major. Just some simple stuff to "get my feet wet"... And look!



Almost a month down the line: My basil is thriving. My chilli plant is not bearing yet but growing well. My curry leaf plant is looking good. My brand new parsley seems to be catching on and my sage is hanging on for dear life. My mint was looking good, but now the leaves have gone black at the tips and the thyme didn't seem to want to grow from the very start, so bleh!
Watering them every evening as the sun goes down and Beena romps in the background somewhere, has become one of the most peaceful, happiest parts of my day.