I loved our sunflowers and they deserve their own post. Through the winter I'd been thinking about how I wanted to try and grow things this year and then spring came and we were in lockdown and I had nothing to grow and I was sad about it in an Eeyore kind of a way "oh well, I suppose I'm just someone that doesn't get to grow things, maybe next time" and then we saw these babies sitting on a wall💖
Look how tiny they were, plants are amazing.
I got so much enjoyment out of watching them grow. look how cool they were even before they flowered.
I loved having them in the garden so much, they were huge and bright and the bees loved them which was adorable (they do laps of the flower, moving all the little flowers around with their hands and aaaahh!! so cute) and it was just a good time.
I wasn't sure whether to let the birds have the seeds or to harvest them but the birds weren't interested anyway, only the pigeons like our garden, so I did some research and left them to dry out before cutting them and bringing them in. their drying out time was actually super rainy so the smallest one was mouldy, the middle sized one's seeds didn't look fully mature anyway and the biggest one had a patch of damp/mould but it was so huge it still had so many seeds.
rubbing all the flowers off was SO satisfying I filmed a lot of it which is in this vlog
you can see the mould at the top of this picture
they're so cool!
I'd never seen the inside of a sunflower before, I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this.
After washing them I spent some time laying them out nice to dry and this is after they'd sat overnight, see how they've changed colour!
and now they're in their jar in the cupboard under the stairs ready to be a whole army of sunflowers next year. I'm hoping enough of them sprout that we'll be able to put some out the front for people to take, like how we ended up with ours
(❁´◡`❁)
