garden adventures

 These sunflowers came off the school bus with Sam one day.  Unfortunately, one stem was fractured and the next morning while Sam was looking at it, he accidentally broke the other's stem.  We assumed they were doomed but since they hadn't died we kept taking care of them.

 Before we went to Myrtle Beach / Sweden, Mon was smart and transferred them to the ground and trained them to our fence for support.  Obviously, they took.  We were very surprised when we came back.  Fortunately, there was on and off rain while we were gone to keep them alive.

 These are the gnarly stems that were broken and still function.

This yellow pine also came home from school with Jakob as a sapling.  Little did we know they grow up to 80' (24+ meters).  For now we stuck it in a pot.  Unlike Sam's dogwood sapling, it looks like the yellow pine is going to make it.  The big question is where do we put it, if we put it somewhere.  It's going to potentially take up a lot of space.  Our neighbors have something similar and it is their front yard.  Guess there's time to figure that out.

Something even more interesting is the red bud sapling poking into the bottom of the picture.  Last year some time, there was an open house at our old house on Lawndale Avenue in Pleasant Ridge.  Our former neighbor told us the owner is trying to sell it to move closer to his kids.  Unfortunately, it's a really bad time to sell and he's up against some really soft priced houses across the street that are also for sale.  He'll be really lucky if he gets what he's asking.  For us though this was a visit down memory lane especially for the kids.  And yeah, the house looks even better than I remembered.  We sure put a lot of work into it.  Every room was nice.  Miss the house and my former neighbors but don't miss the street.  While there, we picked up some fallen red bud seed pods from the tree we had planted while we lived there.  When we got back home Mon stuck the pod whole into a pot to see what would happen.  Well, nothing happened.  Not deterred and having plenty of extra pods left, I looked up on the internet what was the best way to get a red bud to sprout.  One tree site suggested scoring the seeds and then freezing them.  Sounded nuts, I thought.  Reading a little further, the site said that the scoring simulated the break down of the outer shell, like might be experienced if ingested in an animal's gut.  The freezing simulated winter for the seed - a necessary trigger to tell it to grow.  I scored the tiny seeds and then stuck them in the freezer.  Kind of forgot about them, actually.  Stumbled across them one day in the freezer while fixing dinner and promptly stuck them in a pot.  Sure enough, after coming back from Sweden we had a little tree growing.  We couldn't believe it.  The site that gave the information said that red buds were particularly tough to trigger, compared with other trees, but obviously it happens often in nature.  The question now is should we plant the red bud in the ground before winter?  Hmm...  We shall see.  Kind of cool to have a sapling derived from the tree we planted nearly ten years ago.