I’d garden if only to grow sunflowers.    

When the sunflowers open, it feels like the garden is complete. That’s the first one of the year.

Look closely…… and you can see the bees enjoying the sunflowers too, in their bee-like way.

As a bonus, on top of their almost perfect beauty, we got these sunflowers for free. That’s right– free. Jim makes a point of harvesting some sunflower heads every fall and wintering them over in the house, out of the reach of the persistent neighborhood squirrels. In the spring, he scraps off all the seeds and replants our center bed. The squirrels manage to eat some seeds, but enough survive that we get a good crop of sunflowers. We haven’t bought seeds in 5 years. Beautiful and free. Pretty amazing.

Or how can being 1/4 from finished make you feel less than halfway done?

Or… forget it!

The point is that our beaten-up center circle garden needed to be reclaimed from the ravenges of renovation. At the start of spring, I was overwhelmed by the task of getting the whole bed cleaned up and re-dug before we could begin to plant our garden.  Instead, Jim wisely pointed out that the whole bed didn’t need to be fixed before some of it could be planted.  Aha, so simple a temporary solution!  So we planted several sections with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, beans, and snowpeas.

For reasons obvious to anyone who is part of a partnership, the completion of the bed too a little longer than expected.  It seems there was a difference of opinion of how best to go about the task.  The unfinished quarter section of the bed loomed larger than its size.

As Jim eloquently noted a few days back, we overcame of differences of opinion and strategy, and together finished resetting the edging and brick, turning the soil and planting our remaining sets.

The garden circle no longer looks half finished.  It feels complete.