Sunflower power

After a bumpy, bruising couple of weeks personally and professionally, I'm hoping to head into autumn with the right attitude. (Yeah, I know, like that's gonna last.)

Nonetheless, I hope letting the sunshine in with a little sunflower power from my garden may put me in the right frame of mind.

The sunflowers that have bloomed in my deck garden in the last couple of weeks sprung forth from the last seeds I planted for the year. It was very late in the growing season, practically mid-June, before I had all the pots and paraphernalia ready for planting them. So it's a pleasant surprise to me that my sunflowers have flourished at all. Now my only regret is that I didn't plant more.

The plants that developed stayed stubby for a while, no more than a foot-and-a-half tall, until I transplanted them into individual containers at the end of July. Doing this and watering them more regularly and generously (who knew?), especially during a parched July and August, finally made the stalks shoot up, with each plant now reaching at least four to five feet in height.

Because of their height, at this point in the summer, my sunflowers are tipping over a lot. Every night this week I've come home to find them sprawled over the deck and hanging off of the other plants, like a bunch of drunks that have tippled too much and now just . . . love . . . you . . . buddy . . . I . . . really . . . do . . . lov . . . *clunk.*

Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, sunflowers, lavender, mint, Italian parsley, basil, rosemary, and oregano--this is all what I've grown on my own this summer. This is the first real success I've ever had with gardening, with most of my past efforts resulting in drowned cacti and "vine-dried" herbs. Even without benefit of a "golden watering can" level of accomplishment, I find myself practically giddy with satisfaction and pride over how my garden has grown. I look forward to coming home to it, watering it, adjusting the plants for maximum exposure to the sun, readjusting them for maximum appeal to the eye, and reading the New York Times in it when the weather and insects allow me to. However, I have drawn the line at reading the New York Times to the plants. Too depressing.

Even my normally quiet, mind-their-own-business, neighbors have noticed the sunflowers and have commented on how well my garden has turned out. Because of this success, next year I hope to plant more flowering plants. I'll even try to come up with a color scheme or pattern for the garden based on suggestions from the container gardening book I bought earlier in the year. Maybe I'll go with a hue-friendly, patriotic theme like "red, white, and fabulous" or, depending on how the new year goes, something a bit more alternative and goth, like "I'm black and blue over you"--a tale of pain and misery told through tulips. Either way, the neighborhood--and area counselors--are sure to take note.

The only semi-disappointment in this summer's garden--other than accidentally toasting a few baby cucumbers in the August heat and getting buggy with the orange peppers--is the slow development of my tomatoes. The plants have done fine, have bloomed, and now have developed about 7 to 10 tomatoes on the vine. But the their growth seems stunted, and the fruits have been slow to ripen.

Still, I've noticed a tentative blush forming on some of the fruits, so I'm hopeful that by the end of September I'll have at least some slightly green/slightly red success stories ready for a meal or two of fried green tomatoes. (And no, Gladman and others, I did nothing untoward to make those tomatoes blush. At least nothing I'll own up to.)

Having lived in major cities or large towns for the last twenty-some years of my life, I'm enjoying this return to my country boy roots. Touching the tomato plants and smelling on my hands that specific summery scent immediately takes me back to my grandmother's ever-abundant vegetable garden, where she grew squash, cucumbers, pole beans, and watermelons. The colors of the flowers remind me of gardens my parents tended over the years in their yard, featuring a flourish of azaleas, tulips, zinnias, pansies, and daffodils. (Sorry. There's really no butch way to write about flowers.)

It's enough to make me don overalls and walk around my spread barefoot, a hoe propped over one shoulder, and a piece of straw 'tween my teeth, like some sort of urban Huck Finn on the cover of Metropolitan Home: The Exurb Special Issue.

That or I'm just about ready for my cameo in "The Cornfield" on Hee Haw.