I’m not much of a gardener and the little I do lacks any kind of the planning and science my Dad applies to gardening, I’m more of a ‘stick it in the ground and see what happens’ kind of guy. I’ve had a lot of success with that method too, from caster plants to canna’s, it seems that anything I stick in a pot seems to grow.

The truth is I find gardening a little tedious because I like to see results quickly. With that in mind I planted a few sunflower seeds earlier this year and was quickly rewarded with fast growing plants. Not being much of a gardener I had no idea when these sunflowers would actually flower though. But in the last few weeks they’ve produced bright yellow flowers that tower over my garden.

It’s the second time I’ve tried to grow a number of sunflowers. Some years ago I planted about 170 and had about 100 grow. They got to about 3-4 feet tall as I jetted off to the States for summer. On my return I expected to see my garden alive with the bright yellow flowers or at least very close to that state. However when I arrived home the sunflowers were gone and all evidence of the existence was gone. After a little investigating I learned that my gardener had pulled them all up thinking they were “weeds.” I was not impressed.

I’m not sure what the record height for sunflowers is, and while I am pretty sure mine are no where near record breaking height I am still impressed as to just how tall they’ve become. The tallest one tops out at 11ft (3.35m)!

My local paper ran a competition recently for readers to send in pictures of themselves by their sunflowers. If the average age of those who entered the competition wasn’t about six I might have been tempted to enter. For now I’m just content to post a few pictures here and hear how you’ve all grown sunflowers when you were kids but now you’ve grown up you don’t do that anymore! Maybe next year I’ll borrow a child so I can enter the local sunflower competition, although do you think that would that be considered cheating?

Local kid grow massive sunflowers
My blog tree