They’ve had a season of mixed fortunes, but by a combination of hardiness and good fortune, the sunflower beds have made it through to flowering, and will be putting on a show for Christmas.
Back in October I wrote about how impressed I was with the seedlings surviving the dry weather until we got water pumping up to them from the dam. Some crops don’t recover from a setback and go straight to seed on spindly stems, but the sunflowers came back in a big way.
On the right is a photo I took of the sunflower bed on the 23/10, the day I started watering.
They had been at this stage for weeks, after a short spell of rain got them started.
They quickly responded to watering, and just over a week later were starting to grow on.
By mid December they were really looking good and about thigh height.
The break of wet weather that we finally got, and the warmth, really got them going and they have soared towards head height in the last weeks, as you can see in the main picture.
These plants are too densely planted. They were very thickly broadcast, as I just bought a bag of birdseed sunflower seed and sowed it as a trial ‘crop’. I didn’t know how they would go with the soil type, grazing by wallabies and insects, etc, so scattered plenty of seed expecting few to survive. The rows I planted further down the hill didn’t get watered, and didn’t survive the dry weather at all.
Then with the water on, they became enclosed in my ‘Mid levels’ garden, and they have made a nice green feature while the rest of the beds were getting established. The objective was to grow a ‘green manure’ crop that would break up and trial the soil, and provide chicken food if all went well. As it turns out they are also providing a few vases of flowers for the festive season.
Happy Christmas everyone!