Ready, set, grow-- our 50th post!

I now volunteer weekly at a historic working farm and park where I am caring for farm animals and (hopefully) learning more about organic gardening . As you know, the word "volunteer" implies "unpaid", but wow! This place sends us home with thank you gifts of heirloom fruits, veggies, and flowers-- all grown without the use of pesticides! I'm learning a lot, and the people are great, and it's buckets of fun.

My learning curve is steep, though. I'm sure some readers are aware of my dearth of gardening skill, but as long as someone approaches a row with me and says, "Weed this row; but potatoes are already coming up here, and potatoes look like this," I'm fine.

Today, as luck would have it, one of the supervisors called out from a corner of the garden, "Would anyone like some sunflowers?" Technically speaking, our yard isn't ready for ANY planting; it needs a total weed overhaul. Understanding and taming our weed-ridden yard was one of the things that brought me to the farm in the first place! But it's springtime, and I have a preschooler who is very interested in things that grow right now. The herb seeds Fiona planted last week at the Home Depot Kids Workshop are, much to her delight, now coming up; and she's watching them with keen interest. She has also recently read Eve Bunting's Sunflower House, and I reread Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children as soon as Spring arrived. So without another thought to the lemon layer cake I'm supposed to be making for tomorrow's book discussion group, I piped up that I'd love to have those volunteer sunflowers to try to make a sunflower house for Fiona and Nora in our backyard this year.

Time will tell whether this project takes off; in fact, we'll see whether my transplanting skills were even good enough to get the little plants home in good enough shape to plant! But Fiona watered them today, and I'm fairly sure we'll have an interesting time with them no matter what. Next step: planning our sunflower house "construction site"...