As promised I said I would take some pics of some new plants coming up, I'm sort of curious myself to follow them weekly and watch the changes a little more closely than I have in past years. What is truly amazing is how they go from little packets of seeds to beautiful plants. The infinite amount of changes that come from being a dry old seed, to a seedling, to a full grown plant that goes on to flower, produce fruit and then turn ultimately produce seeds that will live on after it. The first picture I have is of a pumpkin, not sure what kind this one is, but pretty typical pumpkin that's been out of the ground for a few days.
The next pic is of some onions - here I sort of cheat - I plant either live onion plants or just get those little onions that have been started from seed then allowed to dry up for future use. These are the latter and tend to produce early onions - most often by the end of July (earlier if you don't mind small onions).
Green beans are next - these guys are a little dirty due to the rain we had the night before. The part of the garden I planted these in the soil tends to get a hard crust on it if it doesn't rain once in a while and had it not rained when it did they would have died in the ground. They were just starting to push through the day before and we had a nice storm that got them out of the ground quick.
Tonight there was another beautiful sunset - the clouds in the picture are actually back in South Dakota (about 90 miles west of here). It was also terribly windy today - gust over 50 mph! I had half of a tree go down right behind my house sometime during supper. That tree always hit me in the face mowing so I really don't feel too bad about it and the other half of it will stay up. All that aside the wind was whipping dust in the air which made for a nice red sunset.
The last picture is something I thought would turn out better than it did. I have more dandelions growning in my lawn than actual grass, but my bees seem to benefit from this, so I just let them be. While I was starting to mow I had this thought that the dandelions were all super huge and grown up and as big as trees and dwarfed everything around us. It made me laugh for a while, but I decided I would try to create my own little silly picture of a dandelion forest. I didn't take any other pictures of my lawn, but if you can imagine such a thing, Krista, the boys and I had a dandelion fight earlier this evening. It mostly consisted of picking handfuls of the stems and throwing them at each other and rolling around on the grass, but it was fun and it was something that very few people in this world will probably ever do again.
Tomorrow all of these used up flowers will disappear, as much as I really don't care about lawn care, it looks like our farm is partly deserted and that I don't really like. The clovers in the lawn start blooming next, nothing like the dandelions, more subtle and fragrant.
This time of year there is a vast amount of change here on my little slice of this world, 60 days ago we had 2 feet of snow on the ground and today everyone that came into work was complaining about the heat! Watching my little seedlings do what they do with only the help of putting them in a favorable place to grow I think helps me understand change better. If you know my life's story change hasn't been my strong suit in the first 30 years of it. The last 4 though I have begun to watch all the changes around me with ever increasing interest - the seasons change, plants spring to life from seeds that look dry and dead, plants burst forth flowers, they dry up and product more seeds.
Looking at these changes - none of them are good or bad they just are a flower bursts, dries up and then seeds are produced. There is no difference when compared with any other species. What I think people in this day and age have the most trouble with is the seed part of life. I think they forget that with every end there is a new beginning. Every where in nature this is true, death is the end of something, but it is the start of something else. The changes that take place from sprout to the flower are immense, much like our own lives.
Change in plants and people is inevitable - I understand that now better and in different ways than I did 4 years ago. It makes my life easier knowing that there is change coming and that I can either accept it when it does happen or be miserable and live in denial. Somewhere in all of this I am getting to the point I wanted to make, I wish I knew how to make changes in myself have nothing to do with any outside influence. The way I think for example - how do I stop the little guy in my head that makes the comments about others that inflate my ego, how do I stop my long standing habit of chewing tobacco, how do I make changes in my diet? The list goes on and on.
I feel like the answer lies somewhere close and that I am looking right at it, but I'll be monkey's uncle if I know what that is right now.
