I've been repotting my houseplants. I have an aloe vera that a friend gave me last year that has had four babies, so I put them in a new pot. I would like to pass them along to a friend after I've made sure they survived the repotting process. I also had a few things that needed to be top-dressed; John and Mary Rose helped me with those. Katherine had cut a branch off of the ivy that's growing on the telephone pole in our back yard, and we've had it in a glass of water for a couple of weeks, so we potted it today, too.

I had to buy a new pot to put my snake plant in. This poor plant was given to me when we lived in Alabama. It traveled to Virginia with us, where its pot was broken during the move, so it was temporarily put into a disposable plastic drinking cup. Three and a half years later, it came to Texas with us, still in the "temporary" pot. All those years it sat on my kitchen windowsill where it got plenty of sunlight, but other than that it was neglected. I'm terrible about remembering to water my plants -- I keep them on the kitchen windowsill so I'll see them every day while I'm doing dishes and remember to water them. They get watered three or four times a month. This poor snake plant, because its temporary pot was so light, and because the thing was usually dried out, was so top-heavy that it often fell over. By the time we moved here it only had about half the amount of soil in it that it should have had, so I got some dirt from the back yard to fill it up with. And I tried harder to remember to water it. Fresh dirt and water once a week made it so happy that it began growing, so about three months later, I finally put it into a real pot with fresh potting soil. That was about a year ago and it has grown so much that I had to buy a larger pot to put it into. Grace helped me repot it this afternoon -- it was actually pot-bound.

So now you know why this plant is also called the iron plant. You also know what to get your friend with the brown thumb.