4/17/2007

All right – time for another update in “Chia Watch 2007!” I’m getting a wide range of reactions on this- some of you think I could just as well be doing “Watching Paint Dry 2007” while others are fascinated, having never gone through the miracle of Chia birth. Personally, I’m kind of in the middle on this- a sort of love/hate relationship. Regardless, let our quest for greenery continue… Again, for those of you unaware- a Chia Head has been “seeded” in our office, and we’re attempting to bring it to a full lush head of plants. Here’s the latest- well, the same greenery I’ve mentioned before, around the bottom and back has now stretched to even longer stemage, with the tiny leaves at the end…however, there’s trouble in Chia-dise… it would appear some of the growth is shriveling and dying! Perhaps the weekends, with no one here to water the Chia Head, are taking their toll…again, it seems like there will never be any growth on the top of the head, since the water level inside the hollow piece of …uh…pottery seems to drop rapidly, never giving those upper seeds any chance of growth. Is the Chia Head actually a poorly-designed novelty? Or, should we have opted for the traditional Chia Pet for better results? Jack at the Yahoo groups “Svengoolieweb” group thinks I should spray it with MiracleGro, and then spray more water on it every day… One thing I’ve noticed- I have gotten very few comments from any of you who have actually grown a Chia of any sort! Seriously- with SO many of them sold every year, especially at Christmas time- NOBODY has ever grown one?! Are there scads of Chia Pets, Heads, and Herb Gardens still sealed up, sitting in the back of closets and down in basements? Are there attic-loads of Chias, gathering dust while the seeds lay dry and brittle in a small plastic bag, never to be spread like so much hummus onto some terra cotta creature? Again, I beg you, kind blog-ingestor- if you’ve ever attempted to bring a Chia to life- share your secrets with us! Send your story to svengoolie@wciu.com - perhaps some small nugget of wisdom can be gleaned from your experience to help us on the road to a scalpfull of greenery. I’m getting to the point where I might never put the Chia on display during one of our shows- quite honestly, unless there is some drastic improvement in …oh, say, the next week or so…Mr. Chia Head may end up in the Chia Unemployment Line, or , at least visiting Chia Hairline Creations ( I’m not just the president- I’m also a compost heap.) We’ll keep watering, making those subtle turns of the Chia Head on the window sill to catch more sunlight, and breathing our excess carbon dioxide onto the little fellow…but perhaps he is on his way to…herbicide…