Monday, May 19, 2008

Sunflower Fun!




I saw this neat article in Family Fun Magazine (if you don't already subscribe, sign up today!) where you grow sunflowers in a square shape and create this fortress out of Mammoth Greystripe Sunflowers. It was too cool and of coarse, it had to do with gardening/planting so I had to try it. I called around (Home Depot, Lowe's, local nurseries) and had no luck trying to find the Mammoth Greystripes, so I turned to the internet. For $2.00 a packet, I was able to find the seeds at www.dianeseeds.com. I immediately planted them and I couldn't believe that all of them sprouted (sometimes, not all of them sprout). The picture of the little sprouting sunflowers is the bottom picture I posted. The top picture is of a sunflower that we planted a few months ago (just a regular Mammoth Sunflower). Well, low and behold, I read an article in Parents Magazine today about planting sunflowers and they had some more neat information about some even bigger sunflowers. I guess the largest in the world are called the American Giant Sunflower and you can get them from Burpee.com for $5.00 for 25 seeds. I ordered one today to try it out so I'll let you all know if they grow. =) I do plan on creating a "sunflower fortress" out of them. They grow 14 feet tall and are very menuverable (where you can bend them into arbors, etc.). The best part about gardening is that once you have invested money into your veggies, fruits and flowers, there's almost always a way to get seeds for you next year's planting out of them. I know that I might have spent $5.00 on a bag of seeds, but I can harvest the seeds I get from those sunflowers and plant them for free for the following year. This goes for everything else...you just have to research and know how to get the seeds. My dad taught me yesterday how to harvest lettuce seeds and oh my goodness, how much money I'm going to save!!! Gotta love how God created plants. Happy gardening all!

1 comment:

Bush Family said...

Oh I wish I was a green thumb.

:-) enjoy!