Someone who knows nothing about gardening talks for way too long about gardening

So, it's occurred to me that writing blog posts about gardening is really quite a cliche, but I have made the enlightened (read: overly stubborn) decision to ignore that fact and continue on forward. Enjoy my gardening success (?)

This is basically just a story about my youth group's attempt to plant a garden. My church is really small, so youth group basically just consists of me and two friends of mine, Grace and Molly. We had stopped meeting after the older kids went off to college (because again, there were all of three members) but at the beginning of the summer, the three of us got together and decided with lots of enthusiasm and few reality checks that we wanted to take initiative and do an activity all on our own. In other words, we had no adult supervision because our church doesn't have anything resembling a youth pastor, and we were all equally unskilled, but we had decided to plant a garden in the middle of the church lawn.

I still don't know why the church council approved this, but they did. So, armed with a permit and fifteen dollars to buy seeds, we set off on a Monday morning. We went to Prairie Gardens and quickly encountered our first problem - none of us knew anything about seeds or flowers. We weren't sure which of the seed packets grew in summer, and were equally unsure how many flowers they would grow. After about fifteen minutes of stupid arguments, a merciful God took pity on us and we ran into Mrs. Diane, a woman who attended our church, was friends with my mother, and happened to be an avid gardener. She took us around the store and explained what all the labels meant, and recommended to us which of the seed packets we should buy.

We were all overly busy that summer, so we'd decided to do the entire planting process in one day. Grace had work at four, and she was the most responsible of us (and the only one with a license), so by 1:30 or so we realized we really needed to choose some seeds and get to the church. So we did, and we headed over, which is where we encountered problem #2. We hadn't actually examined the plot of soil we wanted to plant in. This was a problem because it was completely overgrown with grass and the dirt below was filled with rocks. It was just bad soil. Instantly, our task became a lot harder, as we had to dig up all of the grassroots before we could start planting. None of us were particularly athletic, so it took us quite a long time to actually do that. (To continue with our ridiculous plan, none of us had brought sunscreen or water bottles, and it was around 95 degrees that day. We were pretty stupid.)

By the time we finished digging up the grass, we were all pretty much done with the project and regretting our noble impulse, but we had already spent all the money on seeds, so we continued doggedly. We weren't totally sure whether or not you were supposed to bury the seeds, but we figured we'd just throw them in the dirt and stomp on them a lot (which turned out to be quite therapeutic). We were going to water the seeds that first day, but we hadn't brought a watering can, so we all figured it didn't really matter, and promptly all left.

We did eventually manage to grow a border of nice, normal looking flowers, which were followed by 20 to 30 sunflowers in a space meant to grow no more than ten, most of which died. Soon after that, our wildflowers sprouted, which promptly took over the entirety of the cleared land and are now extending outwards into the grassy parts of the lawn. So if you drive by a tiny white church and happen to notice that it is completely surrounded by wildflowers that are taking over everything, you know who to blame.