Michelle's Seeds

  sunflower 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

Back in November of last year, Michelle gave me a little gift bag full of wonderful goodies: caramels, rocket candies and little packages of seeds culled from her own garden and packaged up all pretty in brown paper. There were four different types of seeds: sunflowers, cosmos and two different pole bean varieties. Each of them went into the ground at their appropriate time with loving care and the intention that these little envelopes from a friend would turn into happy healthy plants. And inspite of all my years of biology in school, and general common sense I must admit that I still find something a little big magical about the transformation from seeds in brown paper to big happy plant. But in this case, magic certainly has happened and this is the month for the splendour of those particular seeds to shine through.

The sunflowers, which are lining about five feet of our new fence have just come into bloom. They're a good five and half feet tall and I think look quite fetching against our "evening smoke" stained fence. The cosmos are doing well along the side of the house, blooming in various colours of pink. And last night we harvested the first of the purple beans for dinner. The beans are going gang busters, stretching out many feet above my six and half foot trellis, and so regularly need to be wrangled back down to earth to trail along its top.  I'm going to have to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out which plant is which as they're coming up in one of my gardening boxes that is also totally overgrown with tomatos and at this point I can't see where one bean plant begins and another one ends. Regardless, they made for some darn tasty dinner last night, though Martin's daughter was a bit disappointed that they turn from purple to green when steamed. An understandable let down I guess.

Thanks Michelle, that was really a fabulous gift with a very long enjoyment factor built in.