Week 14: Seven Sunflowers

This week's project: seven sunflowers, ready to grow.

April 3: small sunflower seedlings

There's not much to this project, because I didn't do this the old-fashioned way, planting sunflower seeds, watering them, waiting, and watching them sprout. Instead, I bought seven sunflower seedlings at the wonderful annual Spring Garden Market here in San Jose, a gardener's dream veggie-and-flower market on the first Saturday of April every year.

I planted them in one of the few empty spots in my small backyard, and tied them to stakes with plastic gardening twine to help them grow straight. It's dry all summer here in San Jose, so I also ran drip tubing to each sunflower to water them automatically every few days.

Let's watch them grow over the next few months. They're so tiny now, but they hold the promise of summer already.

Here are our sunflowers on April 24 - wow - a couple feet high already. The yarrow plants they were planted around grew too. We'll check in again in a few weeks . . .

On May 20, the sunflowers are now higher than the fence. In fact, they got so top-heavy yesterday that some of them fell over and I had to tie them back up to their stakes. The yarrow is blooming underneath them (those are the yellow flowers to the right) and the pink roses are blooming to the left. Soon they'll be blooming!