Beautiful Spring!!

The kids and I made it back to Virginia greeted by a spectacular Spring! In Washington, D.C. the cherry trees were just exploding with white blossoms. We praised God this morning, too, for our own beautiful country roads, lined with purple trees, new green leaves, yellow and red bushes. Stunning!

We also were greeted by Spring growth inside our house. A few weeks ago, the kids and I were inspired by a Family Fun magazine article on growing indoor plants from fruit pits and seeds. We bought some lemons, grapefruit, sweet potato, and avocados and carefully followed the author's instructions as to how to plant them. The citrus seeds we put in small peat pots, sealed them in ziplock bags, and put them in warm places. We peeled the avocado pits and then put one seed in each pot, half sticking out of the dirt. The sweet potato is suspended by toothpicks, half-submerged in a jar of water.

During the first few weeks, we kept an eye on the various pots, hoping to see some change. But it was still the early days. When we were gone for 9 days, we kept forgetting to ask Steve if anything was happening to our plants. Upon our arrival, though, Naomi's first thought was to find out how the plants were doing.

So even though it was after 11 PM, I checked all our pots and excitedly got the kids out of bed (they weren't asleep yet!) to show them God's handiwork! All of our citrus plants were sprouting little green shoots with tiny leaves. Two pots even had roots already protruding from the bottom. Our sweet potato has new little white rootlets growing into the water. And our avocado seeds are less obvious, but also seem to be changing a little by splitting open.

We bought a few more supplies today and did some more gardening, putting the peat pots into ceramic pots and watering the grapefruit plants with plant food. I love doing hands-on stuff like that with the kids so they can get dirty and see how things work and then have a sense of wonder and accomplishment. Now they have picked seeds right out of a lemon, planted them, and seen how green leaves and white roots come out of the seed (we pulled one out of the dirt to get the full view, and the seed casing was still right there with the stem and root poking out). Now hopefully they'll survive to become nice indoor plants. We'll keep you posted!