Poor Pitiful Poha Plant

We have become good friends with 3 other couples we met at tai chi more than 10 years ago. We always laugh because in our small group, we have two Kays and two Calvins. We've also traveled with two of the couples to Europe.

Anyway, some time in January, the other Kay said a relative had given her several little pots of Poha plants. The other name for Poha is Physalis peruviana, Ground Cherry, Cape Gooseberry or Goldenberry. We were all given a small potted plant.

Someone said it could grow wild so putting it in a bigger pot might be a good way to contain them. It would be a race to see which of us would be able to have the first berry. 😁 OK, that would be a challenge since I do have a significantly brown thumb.

However, one month later.... Yay! The teeny Poha plant had grown lush and beautiful! There were flowers and even some fruit already starting. 

Ummm.... When I saw Myra's plant which was smaller, I crowed, "I win!" 

I was kidding.... sort of. Art shook his head, smirked and said, "Bachi..."  Bachi is a Japanese word meaning something like divine retribution or punishment.

A couple of weeks later, I was noticing little mushrooms in the dirt. 😕 I didn't think about the fact that the planter saucer at the bottom might be keeping the dirt too wet with all the recent rainfalls, thus causing mushrooms to grow.

And then we saw that there were actually two plants in there and one was looking decidedly unhealthy. We took away the saucer so the dirt wouldn't stay wet, but that sad plant died leaving behind its sibling.

We decided to see if we could save that remaining Poha plant and tenderly nestled it into an unused garden space instead.

And then we kept it watered, but sparingly and watched over it like a mother hen. It seemed to be giving up. My sister-in-law who is another Kay said we should talk to it and be sure the soil is well drained.

We were giving up hope when suddenly, one morning, it seemed to perk up.

However, leaves were falling off the poor Poha.

When I looked under the leaves, I saw these terrible, voracious bugs who were eating the last few leaves off our valiant Poha.

I looked under the leaves and started smashing all the nasty, disgusting bugs.

When I told Art about it, he wanted to know what kind of bugs they were. 

Apparently, I hadn't killed them all because Art brought in a couple of leaves with a bunch of bugs on them.

He got out the magnifying glass and started looking at them on my desk. The bugs started exploring their new surroundings. 

They began crawling along a paper clip. 

Art asked me to hold up the paper clip with my fingers so he could take a photo of the bug with his iPhone.

And no, I didn't PhotoShop any of the bugs. 

What looks like an eye is just some sort of reflection on the bug's head.

But now I felt bad (sort of) for killing all his friends.

Now they looked sort of cute...

Sigh...

And then...

A day later, my little Poha plant had even less leaves.

I didn't know whether I should but I gave it some fertilizer in the evening.

The following morning, I saw something green near the stalk.

Could it be?

Is that a baby Poha shoot?

Fingers crossed.

But then a week or so later.

Sigh...

Mom had asked for the clippers so she could trim the bushes in front of our house. We thought that would be OK, but she decided to clip other things forgetting that we'd asked her to absolutely stay away from the Poha. We were aghast to see that she'd chopped off our baby Poha shoot.

And of course, she could not remember doing so. 

Sigh...

But then...almost 2 weeks later, our Poha decided to try again.

This time, Art decided to put up some orange tape and I wrote in Japanese, "Please do not touch."

Will it work? 🤞

And here we were at May 7th!

Fingers crossed 🤞 we will see a fruit in a month or two. Maybe...

By the way, Myra's plant is much, much, much bigger. 😂