This isn’t exactly my kind of going green

For some, it’s the first flakes of snow falling from the sky, or the first Christmas carols playing on the radio, or the first Christmas decorations going up along Main Street.

For me, however, there’s something else that’s the first sure sign of winter.

That’s when our house turns into a greenhouse, as my wife moves her outdoor plants indoors to survive the winter.

If it were up to me, I’d just practice a little botanical Darwinism. If those plants aren’t tough enough to survive the winter outside, they don’t deserve to survive at all, I figure.

However, if I advocate too strongly for that, Terry would probably start taking the same approach with me — and I have enough trouble surviving the winters here when I spend most of my time hibernating indoors. Left exposed outdoors for more than a few minutes, I’d be in real trouble.

So instead, I will spend the next few months with my trusty machete, scythe and sickle getting from one room to the next in our house.

The problem is that a whole bunch of potted plants scattered throughout the yard and across the front porch and steps during good weather suddenly become a small jungle when they’re crowded together inside the house.

Add in two adults and two dogs, and suddenly it gets a little crowded — or should I say more crowded — in our little home.

We’re not quite “The Little Shop of Horrors” yet, but if I start hearing any voices pleading “Feed Me” coming from the plants, then the dogs are definitely in trouble. Better them than me, I figure.

Actually, it feels more like I’m in an Indiana Jones movie, slashing and hacking my way through the jungle, except there’s no treasure at the end of the trail — although our attic does look a bit like that government warehouse full of dusty crates and boxes from those movies.

I have to admit that, to my mind at least, all these plants serve no useful purpose, but I would have to say the same thing for them when they’re outside during the summer.

If they were edible, if she were growing fruits or vegetables in those pots, maybe we could justify it by making them part of our meals.

But instead, they just sit around taking up space and doing nothing. And no, that doesn’t make them equivalent to me.

As I said, the plants are all over the house, including the shower, where apparently the thirstier of the plants go to get a little extra watering.

They rotate in and out of the shower in some random order as Terry sees fit, so it’s always an adventure to find out what plant you’ll be showering today.

Actually, it adds a few extra steps to the process of getting a shower. First I have to remove all the plants — and any debris they might have left behind — then, after completing the shower, replacing all the plants.

I guess I’m supposed to leave the plants in the shower with me so they can get all the watering they need, but I’m not ready to take this au naturel thing quite that far.

Otherwise, I’d wind up getting scratched by a fern in places where you don’t want to get scratched by a fern — unless Fern is a 21-year-old Playboy magazine centerfold, and I can assure you that’s never going to happen in our shower.

There are all kinds of plants around our house, including a small tree in a pot on the stairway landing. It just makes me glad our dogs were never trained to relieve themselves on tree trunks, because I’m sure as heck not cleaning up that mess if they did.