Until the Pumpkins Come...

I love petunias.

If I had to choose one flower that reminds me of my childhood and my green-thumb grandmother, petunias would be that flower. Every spring for as long as I can remember, I have grown killed (sigh) petunias in honor/memory of The Farmer's Wife. This year, I was bound and determined not to murder them by mid-summer. 

I thoroughly researched, and watched several expert YouTube videos about how to properly care for petunias. I discovered that I had been pruning them incorrectly, and maybe...just maybe...I had a chance of getting my beloved flowers out of the month of July alive. I devoted my efforts to the two large potted petunia plants that greet you at our front door. I have hoped through the hours of deadheading (such an odd term when you are trying to keep your plant from dying!) that my care would be enough for them to at least reach the end of August. 

To properly prune a petunia blossom, you need to remove the entire base of the blossom, not just the spent blossom itself. When the rains come, it can be particularly difficult, because many spent blossoms will fall off, leaving the start of a seed pod behind.

I have eagle-eye searched and gently fingered through stems and sticky blossoms of my petunias to find left-behind seed pods.

Among the leaves, they can be tricky to spot, especially as the plant grows and thickens. When I discover seed pods I have missed, a wave of panic floods me, and I go over my flowers several times more so I can rest knowing that I removed all the pods. 

If a seed pod accidentally gets left on the plant, it sends a message to the petunia to "set" seed and stop growing flowers. Stems become spindly and wither, eventually shutting down a thriving plant. I know this is the plan. This is the natural way of things. It's okay when this happens, but I don't want this to happen until the end of summer. 

I DON'T WANT THIS TO HAPPEN UNTIL THE PUMPKINS COME...

If you have been following our story, you know that summer is a hard time for an ebay business owner. We are hanging on with mustered hope that we will, also, make it out of the summer alive. The quiet hours that I have spent watering and pruning have slipped into prayer hours. Prayers, unintentionally, turned my precious petunias into a symbol of perseverance and hope that we, too, might make it until the pumpkins come. 

A few days ago, I discovered a little Audrey II (from Little Shop of Horrors) staring me down. Jaw set, I immediately removed her before she could shout at me, "Feed me, Seymour!" I kept thinking that this was NOT going to happen on my watch. How much more does God care that WE make it out of the summer alive than I care about my silly plant? I could almost hear God whisper to me, "Not on my watch, Shanda."

NOT ON MY WATCH.

In brutal honesty, one of the potted petunias is getting a tad spindly, the stems are becoming more stiff than lush, and the deep green leaves have turned to a pre-death-yellow hue. In further brutal honesty, we are getting a little spindly, too. But as I sit here on my patio swing writing this, crickets and cicadas serenade my words, cooler evening air comforts, and the sunset swirls in pre-autumn pink and gold over the rooftop of my house. Fall is just around the corner, hope is hanging on, and...

THE PUMPKINS ARE COMING.

VERY SOON.

"Lift up your head...I know things were bad but now they're okay." (lyrics from "Suddenly Seymour")