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Lesson Learned - Sunflowers

By: Decomposed in GARD | Recommend this post (0)
Thu, 06 Oct 22 7:03 PM | 328 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Gardening 		Msg. 00020 of 00028
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I planted sunflowers for the first time - about 30 in a 15 x 15 plot near the base of the garden. The soil was unfertilized yet they did well enough. The flowers came along about a month behind what Burpee led me to believe and they were a little smaller than they could have been. Still, not bad.

Three weeks ago, I watched some videos on YouTube and determined that the flowers were close to being ready. I picked one of them just to familiarize myself with the process and see how ready it truly was. I discovered at the time that scissors aren't the right tool for cutting the ropey stalks. I brought the one flower inside for further drying.

Last week, I scraped the seeds out and filled half of a peanut tin. That's a lot of seeds! I haven't counted but there could be 500 seeds from that one flower. I'd have harvested the remaining plants right then, but I discovered that my pruning snips were all at the barn (at property #2). By the time I fetched 'em, we were having a rainy spell. And that brought me to today.

I went down to the garden, snips in hand, ready to bring back the entire crop and found that the plants, the ones that were still upright, had dropped their seeds. ALL their seeds. They're spread all over the ground. Critters, clearly more attentive than me, spotted them and now there is nary an intact seed to be seen.

Okay. Lesson learned. When sunflowers are ripe, you pick 'em! And when they aren't, you check them every single day or the entire crop will be lost in the blink of an eye.

I'm not too upset. In fact, I've been laughing about the whole thing. I got 500 viable seeds from the one plant, and I didn't have any real plan for what to do with 25 or 30 times as many more. Next year, though, I could have a far bigger crop . . . and I'd be miffed to lose it all for such a dumb reason.

This year? I'm sure I made the birds and chipmunks REALLY happy! I'll get over the loss.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months

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