We only have a few opening up right now, because we planted most of our sunflowers to bloom in September.

Sometimes I wish I lived in a warmer place, just so I could have these be in bloom all year long.

My favorite flower

We didn’t start planting sunflowers until mid-June, so the ones that are opening now are all volunteers. This looks like a Sunny Smile (F1) dwarf sunflower, about 3 feet tall. It’s a hybrid variety so I think it’s kind of neat that it’s producing a large head similar to the flowers last year. Perhaps I will save seeds from it and see what we get in 2012!

I spend too much time every summer trying to get clear pictures of bumble bees. They love the onion flowers, so it’s a good way to attract them to the garden!

Onions are biennial plants, which means the first year they make bulbs (which you typically eat). If you don’t harvest onions the first year, they will come back the second year and go to seed (flower).

Last year we missed quite a few onions, and I transplanted them into the back of my perennial herb and flower beds. They are now as tall as I am, and just starting to flower!

The garden is seeded and planted; rain is in the forecast. Now we just sit back and watch it grow!

We took advantage of the nice 25ºF weather last weekend and brought Puck out for a lot of long walks. Apparently, my legs aren’t used to that kind of exercise yet, and I now have a stress fracture in my right leg. There isn’t much that can be done about it, except for staying off of it and walking lightly for 4 weeks. Fortunately I spend 10 hours at a desk every day anyway, so that shouldn’t be too hard.

It was a chilly 10 below when I woke up this morning, with wind chills well below that. Bitter cold, but a heat wave compared to the -27ºF air temps we had a few weeks ago. The forecast is suggesting that we may see 40 by the weekend though! Unfortunately, I won’t be able to enjoy it with this silly new leg injury.

I wanted to share a couple of summer photos from our garden two summers ago. It always warms me up to look at pictures of sunflowers. Enjoy!

And our random two-headed Skyscraper sunflower, which was kind of neat:

I’ve been incredibly busy with work, and the garden seems to change faster than I have time to spend in it!

We have cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, potatoes, beans … and by the time 5:00 roles around, all I want to do is crack open a cold beer and not think about making dinner. I’m going to try and make scalloped turnips tonight – but I think we might be out of soy milk. I’ll take some pictures and post the recipe when I do!

I was just looking back on photos from last year, and these sunflowers are opening up an entire month earlier than they did last summer! We had a warm spring and everything got off to an early start. I always associate sunflowers with the end of summer, beginning of fall …. nice to see these so early this year!

These are dwarf sunflowers, about 3 feet tall with nice large single-flower heads. I planted them all along the front of the garden. I’m hoping they will all open up together soon, and make a very pretty border.

Flowering Onion (click for a close-up)

We’ve never had much luck growing onions or other root crops.

In Morris, our soil was too heavy, and root crops were leafy at best. We ate a lot of beet greens, actually! When we moved to the “Great Anoka Sand Plain,” I was excited to see how our carrots, onions, and potatoes would turn out.

I don’t have the patience for annuals (unless you can eat them), so I figured I’d add some perennial flowers to the garden this year. This spring, I picked up about a dozen daisy-like plants at a really neat family-owned nursery that is literally two minutes down the road from my house. Terrific plants at $2 each – and they are already flowering and gorgeous, lining the entrance to my garden.