To Bloom or Not to Bloom

By Phil Lamb, Real Estate Business Magazine, March/April 2008

I was in my living room the other day when I saw a package of spring flowering seeds that my daughter had left in a little bowl. The seeds were spilling from a tear in the package, ostensibly on their way to being planted, but apparently something or someone got in the way and she forgot to plant them. So there they sat — and it got me thinking.

I picked up one of the tiny seeds and marveled at the simplicity of that little dot in my hand. What a massive difference from the dramatic, fully formed, flowering beauty pictured on the front of the package. It really is a miracle of sorts how that seed goes from that clean, pure little shiny hard bead to a soft, billowing, colorful masterpiece.

Decision Time
As I was holding it, I realized that I too had a couple of choices as to what I would do with that seed. I could simply place it back into the bowl along with all the others, where those seeds would never change their form except to perhaps shrivel down a bit with age and become unusable and worthless. Or, I could take those same seeds and take the proper action, get them quite dirty, put them in very filthy soil, an unknown environment for these shiny little hard seeds. In fact, if I added even a filthier soil compound, manure, the better my odds would become to grow even more vivacious and brilliant and exquisite flowers.