With Silver Bells and Cockle Shells and Pretty Maids All in a Row

You're probably all guessing that by now my garden has flourished. I probably had to figure out what to do with everything being crammed into tiny squares. Since I've got to be close to my 55 days to harvest or whatever, I should be eating fresh vegetables pretty soon. Right?

NO!

Unfortunately, my garden has not grown since I transplanted it, back whatever day that was. Fortunately, however, it hasn't died. It's just stayed the same. The beans have grown a little bit. Some strawberries have grown. (Stupid snow in April!)

I had abandoned the many carrot sprouts that were no way going to fit, and a couple sprouter things that hadn't grown, and was waiting to carry the indoor-greenhouse to the trash with everything else. A few days later, everything was dead except for a little tomato sprout that had grown and reached out in search of light. It really obviously wanted to live, so I moved it outside with everything else, though it isn't planted.

I also wanted to post today about a couple movies that were part of the reason I started a garden this year. Entirely coincidentally, after I saw the blog post about square foot gardening (but before I planted mine), I had two gardening movies come through Netflix.

It turns out, there aren't a lot of gardening movies out there. Today I Googled gardening movies, and basically a lot of people talk about the scenery in movies about other things (like, for example, Sense and Sensibility). But a few movies do come up on any list of gardening movies. Included are BOTH of the two that Netflix had randomly suggested because of other movies that I'd liked before. They were both clever, funny movies.

The first movie that I saw was Greenfingers. It's based on a true story. It's about some prisoners who get all into gardening, and go on to compete at England's huge garden show. It also has a kind of funny romance in it. I loved this movie. (It kind of reminded me of the Shawshank Redemption, although I don't think it's quite as clever. Still, the prisoners and the library/gardening projects struck some kind of a chord for me.)

The other movie came next after Greenfingers, and it was Saving Grace. The premise for that one is, it's this old lady whose husband dies. She finds out that he's left her deep in debt from his little get-rich schemes that didn't work. It's so bad that she's about to lose the house that they've like, spent their whole lives in. She's all into gardening, though, and her gardener gets her started growing marijuana. This one's kind of about that, and the way her town gets all into it. I worried that this one would be stupid, because marijuana makes people say and do stupid things. It actually wasn't a stupid movie, though. The plot flowed well. It ended differently than I expected. It's not one that I would buy, but I did really enjoy it. It was very funny. And it won the Audience award at Sundance.

Both came out in 2000. Netflix recommended them to me because I liked: Waking Ned Devine, Chocolat, Dear Frankie, Children of Heaven, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Amelie. So if you liked those movies, you'll probably like these, and if you hated those movies, then you probably won't like Greenfingers or Saving Grace too much.

ALSO, please note that you may want to use ClearPlay or find edited copies; they take place in the UK and one of them involves prisoners, soooo... there aren't blood and guts, or intense adult scenes or something, but there is a fair amount of bad language.

They're great movies, though. Non-stuffy gardening movies.

Well, that's basically it.

Except, when I Googled "mary mary quite" to be sure that I had my title spelled correctly, I found out a lot about that nursery rhyme. It's actually kind of gross, and interesting. Wikipedia has a page about it. I can't believe everyone teaches their kids this stuff.

And finally, this is my 100th post.