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 my days being a semi-nerd by profession.

In my spare time, I garden. And just to tie the two together, I make spreadsheets.

Here is what my garden looks like now:

And here is the sunflower planting schedule, so we are guaranteed to have flowers in bloom on September 10th:

I realize now that I am addicted to growing cole crops. I have 18 tomatoes, 16 peppers, 8 eggplants, and a variety of melon/zucchini seeds that I wanted to plant. I need a bigger garden!

I mentioned in an earlier post that Chris and I have an upcoming wedding! September 10th, actually. This has changed up the garden plans slightly, as I would like to grow most of the flowers for our wedding.

It’s a fall wedding, and will take place outside, so sunflowers are fitting. We’ve had good luck with sunflowers in the past, and I think we can add some daisies to the mix.

Here are a few pictures of the smaller sunflower varieties we grew last year. The yellow flowers are dwarf varieties, Sunny Smile, from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. They produced beautiful 6″ flowers, with dark centers. The orange variety escapes me now; it was a random sunflower packet I picked up at Bachman’s last spring. They were pretty, but not too productive.

I ordered 6 new cutting varieties, along with Sunny Smile and some of the standard 12-foot sunflowers from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. We haven’t grown these yet, so I don’t have pictures… these are from Johnny’s website/seed catalog:

Varieties we’re trying for the wedding:

• Moulin Rouge – 3″-4″ blooms
• Sunbright – 4″ – 6″ blooms
• Autumn Beauty – Assorted sunflowers, up to 8″ blooms
• Little Becka – High producing plants. I think these are smaller flowers.
• Sunny – 5.5″ – 6.5″ blooms; a tall variety
• Velvet Queen – 5″ blooms (look similar to Moulin Rouge, but larger flowers)
• Sunny Smile – 3″ – 8″ blooms, with smaller branching flowers

I’ll update on the progress of these flowers over the summer. I am hoping that succession planting through Mid-July will yield enough for the wedding this September. We’ll just have to see!

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.