Flowers

Last year, me and Lee-Anne tried to grow sunflowers unsuccessfully. This year I planted 60 of them. They started to sprout but then someone ran over them with a lawn mower. Five survived. Three broke in wind storms. I tried to stake them up, but only one of the broken sunflowers made it through. Three left. Fortunately, two managed to blossom

Weird thing is, I thought I planted purple and teddy bear sunflowers, but I got regular ones. I don't remember if I put regular flowers in the mix, and the standard are just more resilient than the variants, or if I got ripped off. They were from different parts of the patch, and I thought I'd sorted the different types into sections, so it seems like they should be different types. Oh well.

Not only did we get the two standard blossoms, one was growing at least two additional blossoms in the joints of its leaves. I had a neighbour in Guelph who managed this, and I never knew how or why it happened. I have since heard from other sunflower enthusiasts that this is a semi-common phenomenon, and flowers like these are called mutants. Kind of a gross way of referring to them, when the outcome is so pretty.

Unfortunately, something attacked in the night and tore both their heads off. I don't think a human stole them, it seemed way to chaotic. It might have been a skunk. I've run into a skunk in the backyard twice and both times it was coming toward me, not away. Me and Lee-Anne also ran into three baby skunks one evening, and it seems like there's a lot of skunk sightings in general.

Anyway, I tried staking up the two now-headless sunflowers. I thought that if the mutant survived, we'd have a shot of its two additional heads blossoming but unfortunately it didn't make it. The non-mutant sunflower survived without its blossom.

This left one final flower, which had yet to bloom. It was the smallest of the three due to being one of the ones that broke in the wind storm. I'd been saying all along that it was my favourite of the three, since I love an underdog story. The first sunflower I ever grew broke in a windstorm and similarly survived.

Well, it eventually happened

 Missing a couple of petals since whatever creature took the other two blossoms also took a bite out of it. It also didn't fully unfurl, maybe due to its size, but I still think it counts!

While I'm at it, I'll show you some pictures of the bulbs that sprouted earlier this year.

They mostly came through in the spring.

As an aside, that sub shop that I've been talking about, Big John's, finally reopened after seven months, almost as unceremoniously as it closed.