Thursday, July 06, 2006

Garden Desktop: Mexican Sunflowers 2006

Last year I started my Garden Desktop series with the wonderful Mexican Giant sunflowers that I grew from Parks Seeds. They're back!


They self-seeded a number of offspring, not all of whom survived the combination of snails and of my garden-bed relocations. I was delighted to see, however, that a couple of them came through with flying colors. I need to take them down at some point to move the greenhouse back about 3 feet, to clear a maintainance/inspection cover in the ground. However they're so pretty that I just can't quite bring myself to do it!

Easily 10 - 12 feet tall, with stems a few inches thick. We have some very strong winds here occasionally, so I took the precaution of staking the smaller pair, winding some tomato tape around the stems and back to the stake between them. The little finches who live nearby are already very excited about the ripening flower heads. :-) Here's the 1024 x 768 version. If you have a higher-res desktop, drop me a comment and I'll upload the 2592 x 1944 version for ya!

4 Comments:

Blogger Lisa said...

Great picture. Looks like a fun plant to grow.

8:26 AM PDT  
Blogger Unknown said...

Really beautiful. How big across are the flowers themselves?

10:37 AM PDT  
Blogger Hilary said...

I couldn't find an email to contact you, so I apologize if this is the wrong way to get in touch with you. I think your sunflowers are fantastic and I wanted to know if you would like to enter our Free gardening contest? We give out an engraved gold medal at the end of every year to each category winner, and highlight the winners in a special issue. You can see the contest page at: http://www.weekendgardener.net/contests-prizes.htm It seems your sunflowers would have a great chance at winning. I would be happy to add a sunflower category. Please let me know. Thank you. Hilary - hilary@weekendgardener.net

10:52 AM PDT  
Blogger Strata Chalup said...

Thanks for the kind words, Lisa!

Claire, the flowers are usually 6 - 8 inches across, with some of the ones on lower stem branches a little smaller, more like 5 - 6 inches.

Hilary, the contest sounds nifty. I've sent you an email separately.

11:56 AM PDT  

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