I have found that gardening is one of those hobbies that is best to fantasize about. Unless you like getting dirty and mildly frustrated.
I started gardening (and by 'gardening' I mean it in the loosest, houseplanty-est way) when I moved out with the BF in 2010. I bought a couple succulents and an African violet from the local grocery store floral department. From an Ikea trip to get some oh-so-needed student class furniture I brought home a spider plant and a miscellaneous pokey leaf plant. As the months went, I acquired some more plants; one from my Grandfather who had moved into an assisted living complex and couldn't take the mammoth aloe vera plant he'd had since 1971.
These houseplants were the best introduction to gardening for me for a couple reasons. First, usually most plants you can buy from a grocery store or a non-gardening store (for example, Ikea) are very hardy. Hardy meaning that they have a pretty well developed root system and good nutritious soil. Basically, these plants are hard to kill. They thrive on the inattention. Regular and moderate watering every 2 weeks is really all they need. Secondly, these plants are not fussed over sun conditions and temperature. Since I live in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, land of the freaking freezing winters, this was great! I could have my tough indoor plants by the windows so they could get some sun without me being to worried about them freezing to death. (Mind on those -40C nights I took them away from the windows anyways.) Lastly, these plants gave me confidence that I could have other more important plants (example: The Aloe Vera) without fearing eternal damnation for killing a 40 year old family heirloom.
From these so called 'hardy' plants I bought some more finicky plants. A shamrock, which is probably to this day the most fussy plant I own, and a mossy fern.
After most of my first plants flourished (yes... sadly their were a few casualties... RIP Mossy Fern) and I accepted my Grandfather's giant aloe vera, I started planting my own seeds to see what would happen. Wooo! 'Real' gardening! I planted some fruit seeds that I grabbed out of the fruit the BF ate: grapefruit seeds, apples seeds, lemon seeds, orange seeds, etc. Many of them actually grew! I also planted some herbs which, for the record, was a bad idea to do in the middle of winter, seed starter kit or not.... But I had more success than failure. I found out that fertilizing plants in the dead of winter is the best way to poison and kill them (RIP grapefruit plant), and I found out that bugs aren't the only thing to worry about infecting plant leaves (RIP Apple Tree via plant mould).
Eventually spring came and I fancied myself an adept gardener (hah) and I got some petunia seeds, tomato seeds and beans to plant. All went rather, well, horrible. I had planted the beans to soon; I had planted the tomatoes and left them to their devices instead of pinching the new growths (which I found out I should do afterwards); the petunias were very temperature sensitive and wilted on a daily basis. It was a bit of a disaster. But I manage to get a crop of beans out of it (in June) and the petunias managed to bloom nicely in late summer. I'm pointedly not mentioning how the tomatoes faired.
My next real gardening experience was cuttings; taking a piece of a plant and making it grow roots and become it's own plant. My mother has had this lovely viney plant since as far as I can remember and I wanted to see if I could grow it myself. Turns out this plant is even older than my memory as my mom got it when she was pregnant with me. So I asked and she gave me a cutting. I put it in a glass with wet paper towel, like those experiments with beans you do in grade school, and sure enough it rooted. Plants are the weirdest things. They can literally grow back their body parts. Now the vine is about 5 meters long and taking over (or at least attempting to look macho besides the aloe vera).
Gardening, it turns out, is one of my favourite hobbies that I'm half-assing. I have had numerous causalities but have learned something from each failure. And while I found some plants increasingly frustrating (I'm looking at you shamrock!) the over all experience has been positive. The next step is definitely going to be to tame that aloe vera before it takes up the whole living room.
But that will be another gardening adventure.
Cheers! <3