The yard next door to us has been a vacant lot since we first moved in three years ago. Each summer, it fills with tons and tons of tall, spiny weeds. Not only that, the weeds, having a nice safe base to mount an attack from, invade our garden by the thousands. So, my plan this year was to outbreed the weeds. I was going to shoulder them out of the area, by planting giant sunflowers that would out-compete them for the resources. Then, we'd have an empty lot full of gorgeous flowers instead of thorny weeds, and we wouldn't have to spend so much time pulling weeds from our own garden.
I harvested as many seeds from our sunflowers that we grew last year as I could. I had several lunch bags full of them by the time fall ended. I was prepared to really go after that lot come spring. I even went over and spread some of the seeds that I had early, hoping that they'd winter well, and sprout in the spring. But, things didn't go as I'd planned.
The empty lot next door isn't so empty anymore. Instead, they finally got around to building a house there. So, all sorts of trucks, bulldozers, and backhoes drove over my little seeds. My visions of a field of flowers dissipated, but the funny thing is, the sunflowers refused to be defeated so completely. Look here, sprouting out of the dirt in the backyard:
And also, here in the front of the house is a nice big tall one:
The bulldozers didn't win every fight.
It'll actually be kind of nice to have a house next door instead of an open field. I think it'll surely cut down on the weeds a lot. But what do I do with the bags and bags of sunflower seeds I saved from last year? I guess I could go find another open area of land and plant them there. Maybe I'll try that.
Oh, one other thing. We also got these sunflowers:
Two years in a row now, the birds that eat from our bird feeder have managed to plant and grow sunflowers for us just by being messy with the bird seed. Aren't they pretty?
No comments:
Post a Comment