Beans, Birthdays and Beginnings

Ohmygod. I have such a headache. Bang. Bang. Bang. On and on it goes and nothing but nothing will shift it. Except perhaps the restorative powers of plants. No, not the digging, doing kind of plant power but the swinging on a hammock surrounded by greenery type.

In this fragile state, feeling overwhelmed and under-resourced I headed off to my daughters' school to begin our first ever gardening club. How the school has gone this many years without one I don't know, or rather now I do.

It's not that the children were naughty or not interested. Far from it. They were very keen, many of them arriving clutching their seeds. It was all me. I honestly don't know how teachers do it and they have far more than the 15 children I had. Whooosh - that's the wind leaving my sails and that banging? My head. Still.

We planted seeds in pots. Sunflowers, my how they love their sunflowers. Courgettes, pumpkins, lettuce, radishes and something called love-in-a-mist which should have gone straight into the ground but today we were planting in pots and one little person was Very Keen on planting this. I wanted to plant purple French beans but no-one else did. We made loo roll pots and used some plastic pots donated by a couple of kind parents.

What I need to do is let them have some freedom to plant what they want but in the confines of what will work and where. At the moment it's a bit of a free-for-all.

If I had just the club to contend with today it wouldn't be so bad. But like everything I do, nothing goes smoothly and most ideas are great, at the time. Today I had to factor in not having a car, making a birthday cake that kept going wrong, not being able to fit car seats into my father's car, trying to tidy the house and organising emergency lifts. *sigh*. All before five little girls come for a birthday tea. Tomorrow it's a High School Musical concert. I hope my head is better.

Still I was slightly heartened when I checked my growhouse just now and saw the Morning Glory I planted last week.They weren't just sleepily poking their heads through the compost, but were bright and perky and fairly rampant. Maybe that's because they're climbers, eager to get on. I wonder if different plants do have certain personalities? Or is my stressful day making me feel slightly loopy?