One of my kid's favorite memories, one that gets talked about more than any other is growing and playing in a sunflower fort.

When they were small money was tight, (and isn't everybody's budget stretched to capacity now?) so we didn't take a vacation very often but kids need fun and adventure.

We had this patch of dirt in the side yard and I thought we should build a fort. Hmmmmm, what to do for materials? Then an old article I read about planting pole beans on a teepee frame came to mind and I thought, sunflowers! In our dry desert heat sunflowers are easy to grow so why not?

I went down to the hardware store with a small budget in mind and wondered how many packets of seed I could get for that amount. Well it was my lucky day! They were getting rid of last years seed at 10 packets for a dollar!! Woo-hoo! I bought every packet of sunflower seeds they had, about 30 in total and went home one happy mom.
So, now the work began. I gathered my little ones and told them of a wondrous place, a fort in the wilderness in the middle of a great kingdom. A fort they would grow and watch over and take care of. A fort that would last only 1 year and then the magic would be gone.

We ventured into the side yard and walked round and round as we talked about how big a fort needed to be for 5 little ones and various friends and family. We had plenty of seeds and all sizes of flowers would grow from 12 inches to 6 feet. We talked about how to plant the seed so that we had tall walls all around and smaller flowers to fill in between so that dragons couldn't get through. Then we dug a shallow trench with a couple of hoes, mixed our seed so our walls would grow solid, covered with dirt and a little fertilizer, added a soaker hose left over from the garden and sat back to watch a fort come to life.

The great thing about sunflowers is how quickly they can grow. Once the seed started to sprout the kids could see the fort grow almost before their eyes. There was great excitement as small leaves sprouted. Great unhappiness when one of the kids forgot to turn off the water and some seeds washed away. Great meetings and negotiations when determining where to pull up some plants to make a doorway, "that's too big, that's not big enough, I don't want to kill that one it's too cute".

Within a few weeks of tender care the plants were high enough to make it hard to step over them and the doorway had to be decided. Some plants were moved, some sacrificed. The kids had a hard time imagining that the walls would grow taller than they were but they became more and more amazed each day as the plants grew. The girls named the small ones; the boys pretended the tallest ones were sentries at their posts.

For the rest of the summer the kids had a fort to play in. It gets plenty hot where we are but that didn't deter them. They had a million stories and plays and heroes in that fort, and soon the walls were thick and tall and they were pretty sure they could hide from the world out there. We had to make a deal that all the toys came in the house at night, I had to explain that the coyotes wouldn't care that the fort was private so things needed to be put away. But everyday more and more things were taken out and brought in at nightfall as the stories and adventures got bigger and bigger.

That summer the kids learned yet another way to make your own fun. They learned that a healthy imagination costs nothing. They learned how to weed and hoe and water without flooding. They learned that a sunflower always turns its face to the sun so their flowers looked one way in the morning and another way at night. They learned patience as they waited for their fort to grow and they learned to cooperate.

Sunflower fort, $3 in seeds, couple dollars of water on my bill each month, endless fun and adventure. One of my better ideas for sure!