Survivor Plantae: Loren's Backyard

I have never claimed to have a green thumb. I don't have a knack for knowing when something needs to be watered, or when pruning is called for, or what happens when a plant has been nearly drowned. Unfortunately, the new house did not come with a beautiful yard, so we're slowly fixing it up and making plans to change things up a bit.

To see how much I need to learn, I planted a small variety of plants this summer just to see what would happen. Would they all die? Would I acquire the elusive skill set I needed to keep them alive? Well, roughly a month in, I think we can take a preliminary look at who's making it and who's not:

Strawberries:
I planted four individual strawberry plants, two of which disappeared. The one that made it is positively thriving:



Well, actually, I thought three had disappeared, but when I weeded last week (weeding! who knew?) I found that a second one was actually still alive:



Bell Peppers:
Making it!



I was distraught because something came along a day or two after I planted these and just bit the top right off one of these. Again, I discovered it had powered through its tragedy of a life during weeding!



Now let's move on to the potted plants:

Tomatoes are looking good, but the basil, not so much:






Yikes.

And in the floral corner, I planted some rose bushes because they are all over the place in Denver so I figured it couldn't be too hard. Apparently, I was wrong:



The funny thing is, these just sort of up and bloomed. I mean, I didn't even know this bush was alive until a little over a month ago:



Gah. Let's just see who makes it through the summer.