Gardening stories by danceofchaos
Any gardening enthusiast will tell you flowers are the jewel of your garden. They also require the most dedication and work.
Those beautiful, colourful creations of nature, make you work throughout the year taking care of the plants in the harsh weather. When the spring comes and the planting and potting begin, these are the ones that need the most careful potting, best soil , care, manure. All these for those few days of summer, when glorious, colourful flowers fill every corner.
I have a bit of love hate relationship with flowers, they usually do not grow well with me. Maybe they know I prefer to grow vegetables and fresh produces. Nevertheless , I still like to try my hand at flowers sometimes. Usually this urge comes too late, when summer is full flow and everyone else have coloured natural decorations overall.
The same thing happened two years back when I saw my friend have sunflowers adorning her garden. Yellow flowers, full in bloom under sun, look so glorious and full of vitality. No wonder Wordsworth wrote flowing verses to yellow daffodils. I begged my friend to give me some plants and she gave them to me. She told me, it might be a little late for them to survive in the hot weather, but I can try.
I tried and I failed. the plants did not survive. My friend told me, they will come back next year. The plants duly wilted and died and unfortunately never came back the next year.
My friend had gone for a trip and she brought back a nice present from me last year. a small seed of sunflower.. embedded in a small potting soil clump. It was so prettily packed to boot. She said, just throw it in the ground and it will grow. I planted in a small pot. As with my trial and error method, this first try was not much successful . the plant did come out, and it did grow a bit for a couple of months. I unfortunately planted it in late August and autumn came just too soon. I told myself, never mind, next year I will try again.
Next year, is this year, i.e. 2020. A pandemic is raging around. People are losing their loved ones, jobs, world is going to face the worst economic crisis ever. For me, this year meant non stop working from home, with only my plants as social company. Among a lot of other negatives, this has given me the opportunity to nurture my garden and following the planting schedule properly.
The sunflower plant was brought out in sun as soon as the winter was over. My friend told me that sunflordo not die and true to her word, the sapling came out around the beginning of April. The plant showed a healthy growth but it took a lot of time for the buds to appear. only around the end of June, did the buds start to appear. Seeing the buds appear gave me a rare satisfaction. I have failed continuously to have flower plants, specially this one. Another school friend of mine, with tons of gardening experience told me to have patience and the patience paid off. the flower took its sweet time to bloom, but it was magical to see and document it’s gradual blooming. The flower is slowly unfolding it’s petal towards the sun, carrying with it all the hopes of renewal and revival. the blooming of the flower, feels like the way the we try to reach our potential, the way a spiritual soul turns to almighty.
The vibrant yellow flower has filled the gardening with vitality, colour, bringing a lot of bees and birds as visitors. Even with social distancing, I have my peaceful company.
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I have no idea what has happened with the blog, but it takes it longer to load and then forever to find a place to comment. Anyway, what I wanted to write is that I have plenty of seeds. In case you want to plant something else this year 😉
I edited it and changed some settings and layout, so it looks really pretty from laptop and tablet. On downside, it loads slowly and sometimes go wizzy on the phone. This layout does not let me play with the comment box either, will try to find a better solution.
I would take some seeds later, planning a indoor october planting. But no more space for flowers or veggies in balcony anymore.