Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I’ve been obsessing about my garden a little recently.

There’s creating visual art or writing something meaningful and then there’s watching dirt and water make a little tiny pea become a massive vine with an edible harvest. The whole idea of eating a crop you grew yourself is just intoxicating. My direct-sown lettuce and peas have finally begun to show themselves, and the corn, zucchini and pumpkins are ready to go in the ground this weekend. Hopefully tomatoes too, if I finish digging their plot (I started last night, but it’s a *big* job), and if can creep past the sleeping praying mantises in our bedroom and make his way to the back fence to ask our Master Seed Grower neighbor, Helga, for some of her millions of heirloom variety seedlings. Here’s hoping.

All this means that there is oodles of yard work waiting for me at home, and I’ve been sitting in my cubicle all week getting antsy in my pantsy about how I need to catch the first possible train home in order to get it all done before it’s too late in the growing season.

So, to relieve some of my “why aren’t I gardening?!?!” daytime stress, yesterday at lunchtime I started a mini-garden at work:

Now, I’ve got to say, these little dudes have about a snowball’s chance in hell of making it out of those containers alive. What we have here is a $5 Dollarama ghetto garden set-up.

Fifty cents worth of dubious-grade potting soil, 6 packs of seeds that were originally only 89 cents, ON SALE at three for a dollar (which means they probably have about a 5% chance of still being viable — they were likely harvested over two years ago), two one-dollar plastic cake cloches to act as mini-greenhouses and maintain the moisture levels over the weekend, some no-name tupperware with holes poked in the bottom as plant pots, and a second seed-starting ice-cube tray with the plastic wrap it came in acting as moisture-keeper.

Worst of all? I am in a cubicle with NO WINDOWS. But by golly, if I get even one yellow wax bean sprout, just one baby radish or a single stock stem out of this, I’ll feel pretty awesome about my green thumb.