Wow!
Hundreds of seeds in each sunflower blossom.
I just watched a youtube video on how to harvest and roast them.
I learned that you know they are ready to harvest
when they are striped black and white.
These are ready!
I've learned a lot this year about growing sunflowers.
I planted 12 seeds in April and 6 plants survived.
The ones I lost were from a combination of not staking them from the beginning
(which I should have done and will next year)
and also what I thought at first
was heavy rains beating them down and breaking the stalks.
But it actually wasn't the rain. I discovered some bugs on the them
and we sent a picture to my husband's awesome entomologist friend.
He told us they were agricultural termites
and that either fire ants or a little spectracide would kill them.
And sure enough, after they were gone,
none of the other stalks broke even after heavy rain!
7 comments:
Just beautiful! What kind of seeds did you plant? I planted sunflowers, but mine are not near that big. And never really grew very tall. I am still enjoying them anyway :)
Tasha I planted mammoths and skyscrapers. They were all taller than me! :-)
Beautiful sunflowers! My grandson planted 2 in our garden and I planted another 4 mammoth, and all 6 have grown to huge plants! I think my tallest is about 14-16 feet tall right now and the head is probably more than 1 foot across! They will be ready to harvest soon and I can't wait! Thanks for showing me yours!
I plant a row of mammoth sunflowers each year along the veggie garden's fenceline. I just love the way it looks and I absolutely adore sunflowers anyway! I don't enjoy roasting the seeds so I just harvest the seeds and add them to our birdseed to keep the cardinals happy. Eye candy flowers all summer for me, true candy seeds afterward for them. Win/win! (visiting through 'From The Farm' hop)
~Taylor-Made Ranch~
Wolfe City, Texas
Now you are ready for baseball season! When my boys played baseball we always had sunflower seeds around.
Taylor-Made I bet that does look nice. :-)
Sandi, Mr. H. LOVES sunflower seeds. Especially for long road trips. I hope he likes the ones I roast.
I love the giant heads! A couple years ago I noticed a few sunflowers coming up in the empty house next door. Knowing that they would die without water I dug them up and planted them. The following year they came back and had giant heads. The birds had spread the seeds and I had even a lot more. This year they came back but the heads are not large. Still they are lovely and I just did a post showing how different each of the centers were. Thanks for sharing yours with SYC.
hugs,
Jann
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