Gardening and the infamous sunflower incident

My garden, much like quite a few things around my house, is not quite normal. Although this is my first real attempt at gardening, I do have an idea of how these plants are supposed to act throughout the Spring and Summer. I'm slowly realizing that gardening involves about 90% guessing. And even that 10% that's supposed to be predictable isn't always what it seems.

I have azaleas, which are supposed to bloom once in the Spring. Apparently they didn't get the memo and bloomed again last week.

I have dying plants that are black at the bottom...and recently decided to flower. It currently looks like the mullet of plants.

And then there's the infamous sunflower incident. I've always loved sunflowers, so I planted some sunflower seeds in the front garden. I was so excited when the seedlings started to sprout. It was such a feeling of accomplishment. I thought it was so interesting to see the whole process of how a seed turns into a sunflower (I even brought a book called The Life Cycle of a Sunflower home from school so Jordan could hopefully become as interested as I was).

He definitely wasn't as amused as I was because my front garden very quickly started looking like a page out of Jack and the Beanstalk. Ok, so MAYBE this wasn't my quirky garden's fault entirely. I probably shouldn't have bought the sunflower package with the word "mammoth" in the title...

So, after the sunflowers had officially overtaken our garden we decided to take action and chop them down. It was kind of a sad day for me, but the package was correct. Even my pretty little flowers turned out to be mammoth. Look how huge they were!

So the moral of this story is: pay attention to seed packages and keep on gardening (aka guessing 90% of the time).