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!
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 :)
ReplyDeleteTasha I planted mammoths and skyscrapers. They were all taller than me! :-)
ReplyDeleteBeautiful 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!
ReplyDeleteI 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)
ReplyDelete~Taylor-Made Ranch~
Wolfe City, Texas
Now you are ready for baseball season! When my boys played baseball we always had sunflower seeds around.
ReplyDeleteTaylor-Made I bet that does look nice. :-)
ReplyDeleteSandi, 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.
ReplyDeletehugs,
Jann