Street blooms

 Street flowers

I just love it when we come upon beautiful flowers, pushing their way up up and up....out of city concrete.....determined to flourish and bloom!

No matter the struggle, they are going TO BLOOM!! LOL

Another day we came upon bright yellow zinnias!

Growing straight up out of a sidewalk crack!

Nobody tending to or watering these city blooms.....and look how pretty they are!

Planted these seeds below in this old pot and they sure grew. Does anyone recognize these?

I had a ball playing with these plants when I was little. If you lightly touch them, they  move and fold up.

When I first showed them to Fairy Granddaughter this summer, she was AMAZED and had never seen anything like it. 

She immediately went hollering to her Mommy "Mommy you will NEVER GUESS what this DOES! Quick, come quick, you gotta SEE!"

 Guess she reacted just like I did, when I was a little girl. LOL

I don't remember what we called them in those long ago days....but we didn't call them "tickle me plant". 

Have you ever grown any of these and does anyone remember what we called them back in those days?

We also had "touch-me-nots". 

They were a large green pod, several inches long, and kind of furry, if I remember right.

 You picked them off the plant, and held the pod in your hand until it got warm. When it got warm, it would start moving in  your hand and then explode seeds. The pod left in your hand would be full of white curly things that I guess the seeds had been on. It sure entertained us as children on summer days! LOL

I'm not sure if "touch-me-nots" was the correct name even, but that's what we called them.

We would also roam through fields and lawns of neighbors searching for something we called "puff balls" which were big mushrooms. We would stomp on them and black/purple dust would swirl all over, they were like little volcanoes. LOL

In those long ago days, kids played outside. None of us would dream of staying INSIDE and looking at phones and video games all day. On pretty Summer days, we couldn't wait to get outside, even if it was hot. I just don't think we noticed the heat back then as kids and if we did, we put on bathing suits and ran through sprinklers or jumped into backyard pools, or hosed each other down with the garden hose. We made ice cubes from Kool-Aid, those were great on hot sticky Summer days.

Like I wrote about above, about playing with the flowers, yes, we entertained ourselves with plants, etc. We planted seeds to watch them grow. The quickest and most fun were bean seeds.

 One of my little girlfriends and I went into our backyard gardens searching for "tater" bugs, we thought those were so neat and we would collect them in glass jars. Tater bugs were brown, white and black stripes. We also caught something we called June bugs, which were glossy and so shiny, with vibrant blue, purple and pink. We called those "june bugs", but that might not be the right name. We were enchanted with pretty butterflies too.

 At dusk on hot summer nights, we would catch lightning bugs in big glass jars. Some call them fireflies, we just called them lightning bugs, LOL. As it got darker and mosquitoes buzzed about, we would play tag, hide and seek, and ghost in the graveyard until Moms would call us in to get baths. After days of playing outside, we would be dirty for sure! LOL

Most all of us had backyard swing-sets and sand boxes. We enjoyed hula hoops, yo-yo's roller skates, jump ropes, and bikes. We played badminton, volleyball, and croquet. There were tree houses and we flew kites on windy days.

 Gosh, yes!--we also played with that now-deemed "dangerous" game called Jarts. LOL And we loved to play Frisbee.

Big Washer/Dryer and appliance boxes became forts, submarines, covered wagons or playhouses. We made up our own fun and didn't need to be "entertained". We climbed, and hopped and jumped and twirled, and after a big rain we would jump and splash in puddles and put plastic boats on make believe rivers and seas.

Us girls would take turns playing on each other's porches to play Jacks or with our paper dolls.

It was safe for kids to play outside. We knew our neighbors, our classmates, and our playmates. We ran fast and we played hard.

It sure was a different world....