Sunflowers

My sunflowers did well this season, they usually do. As long as they are in full sun, they really don't care about anything else. They seem to manage in any kind of soil and rainfall, or lack of. The scarecrow in the picture is about five feet tall, so I'm figuring the sunflowers are ranging from six to over eight feet. The ones towering above all the others are called Russian Giants. Their size is pretty impressive but the really great thing about them is they tend to bloom late in the season and can withstand a touch of frost. When the garden is tired and is thinking of giving up the ghost, wilted and frost-bitten around the edges, these sunflowers flame into bloom, giving one last spark of firey life and joy. The last things in my garden are the sunflowers and pumpkins, yellow above and orange squatting below amoung the dried leaves and red earth.

I planted the sunflowers in a stand, at the end of the three rows of corn. I had run out of corn seeds when doing the three sisters planting and decided to use use the sunflower seeds to finish off the rows and have something the snow peas could grow on. I won't do that again. The snow peas really struggled there. I think the sunflowers just provided too much shade for them. May-be the sunflowers grew too fast and yanked my poor snow peas right out of the earth. Last year I dotted the garden with sunflowers here and there in groups of three. That looked really nice and seemed to help balance out the garden. Next year, I think I will go back to that and try growing Black Oil sunflowers since they are the ones my rabbits like the best. I did discover that having the sunflowers between the corn and pumpkins had its advantages. The sunflowers acted as guardsmen and prevented the pumpkin vines from creeping up the corn stalks and overpowering them. I had always thought of my garden as a tranquil place of harmony and cooperativeness. Now I know that there is a hidden war going on and the only truce is balance and knowledge. I think all world leaders should have to tend a garden, it would do a world of good, or if you will, it would do the world good.

Harvesting the seeds are fairly simple, I just cut of the whole flower head once its head cannot raise up and greet the sun anymore. I pop the flowers into paper bags and they dry out quite nicely. When dried I just remove the seeds, store them in mason jars and wait for spring.