The Sunflower Jungle

Dear Readers, 

This will be my last blog post for a few months. 

Hughes Baby #4 should be due sometime in June and I can already feel the weariness in my body calling me to rest more and wait patiently for my new little one. 

I plan to pick the blog back up again in August, and switch to a weekly update instead of twice weekly.

Thank to so many of you who have told me how much you enjoy reading my blog posts. The fact that you take time to read the snippets I post on here means more than you know. 

But for today, I present my final blog post for May: The Sunflower Jungle 

Sunflowers are my kind of flowers.

Sunflowers are easy to grow, cheerful, impressive, drought-resistant, and bird-friendly.

My Grandfather Blackwell grew them every year and not a year goes by that I don’t think of him when the sunflowers grow tall.

This year, we planted nearly 50 sunflower seeds. For some reason, (perhaps having to do with the “help” of my 4-year-old, or perhaps having to do with bad seeds) only about 20 sunflowers germinated and came up. This ended up being a good thing. They are HUGE, and those 20 plants in their bed look like a small jungle. Some of them are over 10 feet tall, and laden with blossoms. A few have begun to open already, and some are still waiting patiently for the right time. 

Take your time, Mama Sunflower- I'm waiting on a baby, too! 

Early Bloomers

One of my favorite things about sunflowers is how they will re-seed themselves. If you leave the flower on the plants until they form into seeds, the birds will eat many of them, but quite a few seeds will fall to the ground and wait there through the winter. In the spring, you will find surprise sunflowers, sometimes in unexpected places.

Volunteer Sunflower in one of our Boxwood Bushes 

This reminds me of kindness, which is a Fruit of the Spirit. When we try to be kind in the name of Jesus, the seeds we plant don’t always germinate where we hope they will. The specific people we want to help, who we invest time and energy into are not always able to accept the help we would like to give. The story doesn’t always end the way we want it to. However, sowing seeds of kindness does reap a reward in places we sometimes never expect. Like my surprise sunflowers, when we scatter kindness generously, we find that surprising things happen, things we could never have guessed, or dreamed.

Galatians 6:9 tells us, "Let us not grow weary in doing good. For at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." 

The Garden in late May

What is your favorite flower to plant? Why?