The good news is I have some great-looking sprouts in my kitchen windows. The leeks are going gangbusters, the tomatoes have the beginning of the first set of true leaves, the pots of Lupins a gorgeous green and even the tiny shoots of Maltese Cross are finally poking their way through the soil. I am really enjoying them all. They are so tiny and so beautiful!

But here’s the bad news: I am not on sabbatical yet. The days leading up to Holy Week are busy and the weeks leading up to my time off are jam-packed. I feel like my kids have doubled their efforts to put me through my chauffeur paces. And, when I ran out of room, I was forced to put some pots in the  window sills upstairs–so I don’t even have a visual reminder that they need looking after. I am worried about my little seedlings. Will I be able to keep them alive?

The plastic pots, which are not all that nice to look at, are the easiest to deal with since the soil dries slowly. The plants in the clay pots, especially the smaller ones, seem to need watering often. The hardest of all to keep moist are the ones I planted in cardboard egg cartons. They seem to dry out in minutes!

I try to remember to water every morning. Unfortunately I am usually in a hurry and use whatever container I can find (this morning it was a one-cup measure I had used for  my oatmeal.) I tend to splash a fair bit of water around, not to mention stray bits of soil. I might have had help from Sydney, who has leeks growing in her bedroom window. But last week, as I carried a glass of water into her room, she suddenly looked horrified and said, “Oh no! You weren’t expecting ME to water those, were you?” She is immersed in five weeks as a page in the Ontario Legislature, and is barely home long enough to sleep these days, so I assured her that was not my expectation!  

Thankfully, Emily is a great nurturer and seems happy to help. We have been laughing about how plants reach for toward the window (she thinks this is hilarious). She turns the pots carefully every day. Maybe with the two of us together there is some hope.

Time will tell.