Sunflower King

Spencer has an inherent need to plant seeds.  He's been doing it ever since he knew what seeds were for.  He'd find seed pods for noxious weeds out on walks and I'd find them later in his pockets (which I quickly learned to empty BEFORE doing the laundry).  If he did remember to actually plant them, he'd dig a hole in the middle of a flower bed or in a pot full of dirt and wait for them to grow.  He usually forgot about them, but occasionally he'd ask why his seeds hadn't grown.  I never did personally sabotage these plantings, but I have to admit I was glad nothing ever seemed to grow.

A couple of years ago a primary teacher gave Spencer and Grace zinnia seeds to plant in a cup. They sprouted readily and we planted them in the flower bed and they grew to be pretty huge and full of flowers. Quite the lesson on faith, those seeds.

This summer, Spencer was determined to grow some more flowers. He made me take him to the garden store when there was still snow on the ground so he could see which flowers he wanted and how much they would cost. He worked hard and earned the money he would would need for the seeds, $10 to be exact. Back at the garden store a month later, he carefully selected the packets of seeds and we took them home and planted them.  We followed all the planting directions, but the only things hardy enough to come up in our miserably poor soil were the sunflowers.  

Spencer was happy enough with that and watched them grow until they were a few inches tall. Then, one morning, the sprouts were nowhere to be found.  Vanished!  Oh, the pestilence that is snails! Spencer was heartbroken, and rightly so. Rotten snails. I promised him I would buy new sunflower seeds for him...and some snail bait.

The summer is almost at an end and the sunflower package didn't lie. Spencer's sunflowers are as tall as 10 feet and loaded with seeds. This, it turns out, was the reason Spencer selected sunflowers. He had dreamed all summer of harvesting the seeds and roasting them. Don't worry, there are PLENTY of seeds. Spencer proudly showed them all to me tonight. So now I'll be looking up how to roast sunflower seeds on the internet.

And somehow, I have a feeling a few of those seeds will be spared from the oven and stuffed into a pocket or tucked away in a ziploc bag for another spring.