Rules were made to be broken.....sometimes.

I am not a gardener. I love flowers and have lots of them in pots on my deck but when it comes to having flower beds to take care of....no way! They are way too much work and I don't have a green thumb. That's why my garden beds in the yard consists of flowering bushes only. It's really hard to kill bushes. I hack them down every few years and they always come back.....so far anyways.
I do however like to plant flowers in my deck planters and pots. They always look so pretty and bright. Last fall I took my last flowering geranium into the house thinking I would winter it over. I dug dirt out of the back garden mixed in some potting soil and put it along with the plant in one of my favourite pots.
It seems I was wrong to do this. Apparently there are certain steps you need to take if you want to overwinter any outside plant inside, with the hope that it will re-flower the following year. You have to have the right amount of light, coolness and water after you have cut the plant down to a specific size, with so much plant and leaves to be removed and blah...blah...blah.......
Of course with my knowledge of gardening, which would be a big fat zero!, I just stuck the potted plant in the front room and happily watered it during the winter and early spring season.
It died! There was no green left on that little sucker. It's stem was hard as a rock. It had no leaves but it did have wet soil. I think it died sometime in early January but I never got around to getting rid of it. I am a bad gardener. That poor little geranium didn't die from lack of water BUT because I didn't follow the gardening rules.
Oh well.....nothing ventured nothing gained, right?
Ah ha!! Not so!
This past May I finally got around to taking the pot with the dead plant in it and putting it out on the back deck with the thoughts of emptying the whole mess out. I had good intentions but I just never got around to actually doing it. With getting the deck set up for the summer the dead potted plant got moved around a few times. The final resting place for the pot ended up being behind some deck chairs. It wasn't bothering anyone and a green weed starting growing in the pot so I decided to just leave it until I cleaned out all the planters when we closed the back yard down for the winter. At least the weed gave a bit, and I do mean a little bit, of colour to that area of the deck.
Last week I looked out my patio door early one morning. I didn't have my glasses on so things looked a bit fuzzy. I saw a splash of colour and I thought a bathing suit had fallen off and in behind a chair.
Imagine my surprise when I went out to pick up the suit and instead found not one but two red geraniums making a beautiful late summer show.
Huh! So much for following rules.....sometimes they are made to be broken.