Sustaining a garden required me to get very comfortable with killing plants. I did not expect that going in - if any one warned me, I missed it.

And it's not just the weeds that are constantly intruding and need to be fought back. Sometimes it's the plant that the previous person placed precisely in that portion of the plot that gets the good sunlight and it's just the wrong plant to be taking that space. Sometimes it's the plant that was the right plant but was let grow so wild that it's suckers are going to destroy the rest of the garden unless it is removed. Often it's the many seedlings that were started because, hey, some of them will fail, but now you've gotten good enough that twice as many survived as last year and you don't have room for twice as many.

Plants grow. It's great and rewarding to watch them live out their cycle over the course of a season or years. I work hard to keep them alive and thriving when they're young and not yet established. But there's still so much killing.

listen man, u wanna know a great truth of the universe?

every plant person stands upon a mountain of plant corpses

i have killed endless plants, and once i've mastered one type i inevitably will kill a new type because so many plants have so many different requirements

y'all have no idea how true this is

I am a plant mass murderer

You have to try, and fail, and fail, and fail again. You have to try lots and lots of variations of different things until something works.

It's not even just the learning process, though. I'm trapped in an endless loop of: plant seeds or gather transplants-> plants grow-> too many plants-> some of them die of neglect-> need more plants -> and so on.

I usually lose about half my stock to overwintering cause I can never get arrangements for all my potted plants before the hard freezes hit...

I'm getting it under control though. I have lots of plant recipients now that are more skilled and don't kill my adoptees as much.

Right now my trouble is with the seeds. I launched a huge personal seed starting project this winter and I got HUGE success with some species (jack-in-the-pulpit had near 100% germination!) and huge failure with others (Not a single Scutellaria...)

If you plant 100 seeds you gathered from the wild, it's a reasonable estimate to expect maybe, like, 10-20 plants. BUT you might get 100 plants. Or 1 plant. Or none.

You don't want to be like "Dammit! I wish I had planted more seeds!" But you might end up like "FUCK FUCK FUCK WHY DID I PLANT SO MANY SEEDS"

Fun fact:

This can be applied to pretty much every endeavor.

"How did you get to be such a good artist?" I drew a hundred pictures and hid or burned 99 of them.

"You're such a talented knitter!" No, I've just unraveled these same socks twenty times.

"I could never bake like that." I had to throw out so many biscuits, they were literally hazardous to eat.

And so on and so on.

Also, through their grimdark training (plus years of compacted trauma), they're the only ones able to perceive the massive, horrifying inequalities in the cuddles and smile dimension.

"Wait, how long has King Sunshine ruled? How long does his species usually have? You... you have a "hug festival" every year, where everyone donates their hugs, because they love him? What the fuck. What the fuck."

"So the Lump-Rock Bugs work in the quarries and mines and sing about it, apparently. Has anyone actually noted the lyrics? The whole 'work all day, work all night, work in the dark, work in the light, work with our hands and our feetses too, there's nothing Lump-Rock Bugs won't do' thing? Has anyone ever... oh, they just love work? They want to do it because that's what they're for? No one ever looked at this critically? No one?"

"So I noticed that No-Fun Nora wasn't at the jelly-jam jamboree last night. Is she okay? Oh shit, really? What's the diagnosis? Wait, hang on, not wanting to be touched is considered a mental disorder here? What's the treatment? Hug therapy?! Where the fuck'd I leave my thieves' tools."

"So, funny story. I woke up today to find just a full-ass dude in my kitchen. Turns out the Dirty Word Detectives can just do that, y'now, let themselves into your house if they suspect you've been saying fuckwords. Also go through your mail. And no one thinks that's weird. So, y'now. Something to think about."

"Did any of you just have any weird dreams? Reminding you the hug festival was coming up? Yeah, so apparently there's a dream wizard who makes sure everyone has good dreams. Also apparently, he receives two chests of golden fairy apples from King Sunshine before every hug festival. And I know his f---ing address."

"So it took me a while to dig up - the librarian kept bursting into song about how 'you've got friends at the library' or something - but the only legal successor to King Sunshine was Princess Marmalade, and she was married off to Prince Starlight about seven years ago. Except I compared the dates and, apparently, she was 13 years old at the time. She stopped sending letters two years ago because she was 'too busy being in love'. Gas up the Teleportation Circle, we can't let this sit."

He is still alive, so he is now 14 ✨

Acerage goldfish can live 10-15 years but some have lived to 30 with proper care. I hope Monstro lives all 30