This year we got eight sunflower blossoms over eight flowers. Beats last year when we got five blossoms over three flowers.
The only surviving flower from our original batch. Squirrels did a pretty thorough job of digging up the seeds, so I put a green mesh weighted by rocks to protect the survivors. But every night I'd find the rocks removed. Eventually I managed to put enough weight that whatever was getting at them couldn't get through, but by that point there were only a few left. Those remaining were bent and weak from having to grow under the mesh and in the end only this one made it. It turned out to be the tallest, perhaps because it had more time to grow, but it wasn't the first to blossom.
Our second batch was grown in jiffy pots and transplanted after they'd matured a bit, becoming less appealing to squirrels. Glad to see they managed to blossom despite being planted late.
All the seeds came from the same pack, but there seems to be two distinct varieties. There are deep yellow ones with kind of stringy petals like the first, and there are paler ones with fuller petals, like this one.
After our first blossom, Lee-Anne noticed that this one looked like it was next in line. I saw that it's neck was broken and the bud was hanging on by a thread. Somehow, it still blossomed. It also might give us more, as it now has six additional buds! I suspect this might be some kind of emergency reproduction measure. It sensed that it had detached from it's initial bud and so it's sprouting more to compensate. The newer buds are dark green, unlike the light green of all the initial ones. Last year we got a couple late-stage buds, and they were a darker green than the first round as well. I don't know why this is, but it seems consistent.
This one was a surprise. I'd been tracking our flowers all summer, but it wasn't until they started blossoming that I noticed this little guy peaking through the back. He snuck up on us!
We didn't just grow sunflowers, we also attempted tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes.
Our best crop were the peas. Once they started producing, they continued to do so for the rest of the season and continue to do so now, although the plants themselves are looking a little sad. We never got such a huge crop that we were using them as stirfry ingredients (I only reached that level once, on my last year of student housing), but we got to munch on them regularly.
The tomatoes weren't quite as bountiful but I'd say they win the most-improved award. In the past I've done well growing cherry tomatoes but the regular ones have matured late, leaving me with the delicious problem of resorting to fried green tomatoes in late fall. This year I learned the technique of "pulling the suckers off" (a term that makes me queasy every time I hear it) which helps them develop faster. Also, these were Early Girls, a breed specifically meant to produce early. So between the type and technique we managed to get a decent crop of red tomatoes. The only drawback is that we don't have a good batch for fried green tomatoes.
Our cucumber plants were large and sprawling, which is typical of their nature. Somewhere through the season they began to look sickly, but they still managed to produce a small crop for us.
The lettuce never grew. Our radishes were vital but didn't act like I expected of them. They became tall, viny, and had some bean-like growths. I doubted that they were radishes at all, but after digging them up it looked like they were trying, as thy had reddened at the root and some had begun to grow rounder.
I'd seen radishes grow pretty successfully when I helped out at the WALES community garden plot. They had poked out of the ground without the huge stalks that we had produced. My neighbour thinks we must have just planted them too close together. Maybe I buried them too deep.
All in all, this was our most ambitious garden at the place we currently live. I know some people with more successful sunflower patches, but this was one of the better ones for me, and we might yet get more. I've had better and worse crops of peas. This is my personal best for tomatoes. I've done better with radishes. Never tried lettuce before, and maybe I won't try again.
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