A Lesson for the Day

Maine residents have a saying whenever some genius does something, well, genius. To you who don't have the Maine twang, you'd say "wicked smart" but with our Maine tongue, we simply say "wicked smaht" or even "wicked shahp". It's not that we can't say say sharp or smart, it's just how we know those millions of Mainers before us would be dissapointed if we did.

Well I personally believe that you should learn something new every single day of your life. Nobody knows everything, although my husband tries to tell me otherwise, so we should have our eyes, ears and hearts always open to learning something new, taking it to heart and growing from what we learned.

I have two raised beds in the backyard, quite close to the house. They're only 4x4 and one of them is designated an herb garden. Last year the other I fancied as a cutting garden, but I don't think I cut more than one or two flowers all year. Major fail. This year I decided I would put 9 tomato plants in it--mostly of the heritage kind. I went out there today to rough it up, check the soil temperature and pull and grass that was determined enough to try to get through the weed block.

I found a huge clump of some sort of hearty sprout, and knowing that it shouldn't be there, I began getting to the bottom of it. I pulled out three good-sized handfuls of sprouts that had roots that meant they intended to stay. I am bigger than they are, so I pulled every last one of them out. 

The lesson for the day is to not have a birdfeeder directly over a raised bed with soil that cost about $11 per square foot. The sunflower seeds had sprouted and had I left them I would have had enough sunflower to press into three gallons of sunflower oil. I have a feeling that for the next week or two I will be pulling sunflower seed sprouts from that raised bed.

Maybe next year, depending on how my tomatoes do this year, I will be growing sunflowers.

And I call myself a gardener!

What did I learn from all this?

Don't feed the birds sunflower seeds directly over my raised bed garden unless I want to go into the sunflower business, which I don't.