Woohoo! We’re getting close to the end of Komono. Gardening supplies was a quick little category and took about 5 minutes.

Here’s everything I collected.

I left out the plants themselves and the compost, partly reasoning that neither are really ‘gardening supplies’, but mostly just being too lazy to lift them all into one place.

There was nothing here to discard, although on the back of one seed packet from 2006 (it was dated) there was a post-it with a list of words intended to go in my family’s dictionary of idioms – words that either we had made up, or which were real words that we used in a specific ‘alternate’ (i.e. also made-up) meaning. For example, meticulism. (That’s a somewhat vaguely conceived part of the brain, I think.)

Since I kept everything, I just needed to reorganise it a bit. My gloves and trowel have never had a home, and there were two nails in the wall already, so I hung them, using a binder clip to hang the gloves. This balcony is covered, so that wall almost never gets wet. My watering can sits beneath them – definitely a joy-giving item! The whole arrangement looks nice, if a bit ‘down on the homestead’ thanks to the broken screen door. Oops, I need to call management about that.

Want a little garden tour? Look at all these living plants!

Of course ‘alive’ is really the bare minimum of what you want to say for a garden, but trust me, that is a feat for me. I started gardening a little when we first moved, but when I had a baby everything scorched and died. I have had to learn that even when seed packets say ‘full sun’, the fulness of our sun is too much for them, so I’ve relocated most to partial shade. Also, did you know you have to water plants? The things I’ve learned from my husband! This was after he commented about my plants turning ‘to a brown crisp.’

But look, now I even think my plants are looking truly happy. Why, parsley, you say? I’ll just step out into my kitchen garden and snip some.

This chrysanthemum has been alive a whole year now. I bought it potted last autumn, and when it was about to die I performed my patented salvage operation: wait till it was almost all brown, dump it in a pot of poor soil outside and hope to feel less guilty than if I had done nothing. It turned to brown sticks over the winter and then amazingly sprang to life in the spring. Now I take better care of it and it’s about to bloom again.

Thanks for indulging me on the garden tour. Now that I’m done with this KonMari category, do you know what that means?

THE KITCHEN! THE KITCHEN!

I’m planning to subdivide the kitchen category into smaller groupings, because it would be too much to do at once. However, I’m really excited to tackle it, because it hasn’t received much thoughtful organisation since we moved in, even though during that time we’ve had a baby, acquired new appliances, and started pursuing zero waste.