How Does Your Garden Grow?

Reader Contribution by Taylor Miller
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You may remember from my blog “The Best Gardening Products of This Fall” that I touted The Aerogarden as the favorite of my Herb Companion samples.  But, I don’t think you appreciate just how much I love it!

They sent me the Aerogarden Classic, which has room for 7 different plants, each in “pods” or pieces of foam you plug into holes on top of the Aerogarden bowl.  The light is adjustable with your plants and goes to a ridiculous height of something like 37″, which was much too high to put under my kitchen cabinets.


So “The Mexican Herb Garden” (with epazote, curled parsley, oregano, basil and thyme) was moved to a shelf in my bedroom.  The kit was supposed to come with two pods of cilantro, which did not grow, so I planted chives (my favorite) and tomatoes, and they’re both growing at an amazing rate.

Let me just say that all hydroponic potters are not created equally.  Sitting right next to my Aerogarden is Prepara’s Power Plant, which hasn’t grown a plant or flower to maturity yet.

So, I bought myself another Aerogarden, this time a much smaller 3 podder that can fit under my kitchen cabinets.  I planted strawberries (!) mini chili peppers (!) and Chinese lantern flowers.

Go buy one!  Seriously, they’re awesome and SO easy to take care of!

Tangently, while brainstorming a title for this blog, I thought of the nursery rhyme:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

I had no idea that this poem is based on the Tudor Queen known as Bloody Mary, daughter of Henry VIII, who executed those who dared continue Protestantism. Silver bells and cockle shells being her common forms of torture.  Silver bells refer to screws that were used to crush the thumb between two hard surfaces, and apparently cockle shells were affixed to the genitals and no further explanation is necessary.

The guillotine, known as the Maiden, refers to the “pretty” (read: easy) form of execution to replace manual beheading, which was, as I read, rarely successful … within the first 10 blows.

  • Published on Dec 15, 2008
Tagged with: Reader Contributions
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