Amaranth

I went for a walk with my father this evening. We bundled up in coats and headed out into the Utah autumn twilight. We didn't have a destination planned, we just started walking. We ended up passing a little house a few blocks away from ours that I have always thought of as "The Artsy House." It's artsy shaped with artsy glass windows. Some new people moved into it a few years ago and upped the artsyness by painting it blue and adding some windchimes. And gardens. Beautiful flower gardens all over the large front yard. This year the gardens were especially pretty, largely because of the huge, red amaranth plants growing in numbers in the largest of the flower beds.

(This isn't a picture of their amaranths, this is a picture I found online)

Aren't they amazing? They look like something from Alice in Wonderland. I'd been looking at and loving these plants every day as I drove past on my way to and from school. So as my dad and I walked passed we decided on a whim to knock on their door and ask about them. We didn't know these people previously, so we felt a little odd about knocking on their door to ask questions about their shrubs. When a man answered though, he greeted us almost as if he had been expecting us. He seemed to already know we were there to ask about the plants. And when his wife joined us in the yard she seemed to somehow know that's why we where there, too. Steve and Michelle told us about the amaranth, about how it needs full sunlight for the seeds to germinate, about how the seeds are edible and similar to quinoa seeds, about how native Americans cultivated amaranth like grain. And then Michelle cut a seed stalk off one of the plants and gave it to us to start our own plants. 

Today's good thing: Nice people can be found everywhere, and amaranth is beautiful. 

Amaranth on Wikipedia