Well I think the sunflowers are well and truly finished. I should have written this a while ago when they looked more like this:

So lets start with…

Miniature sunflowers.

These were planted from seed on 10th April.

Just over 3 months from start to nice. Some of these got dried out, started to wither a bit, and so I took them to the allotment (the allotment I sort-of have access to is mentioned here). What of the ones at the allotment?

Well they grow bigger, and produce more flowers off of each plant, than the at-home-in-pots variety. Good news.

Giant sunflowers.

Started growing them all 10th April, from seed (not sure if you can even buy sunflower plants, but they’re really easy to grow from seed, so don’t know why you would bother anyway).

Most of the ones at home were planted in pots.

I think it’s fair to assume that the test of a good sunflower is how tall it grows. It’s fair to say I won’t be winning the Blue Peter competition with any of mine.

I could probably mask this, by showing vibrant close-ups like this:

Or, I guess I could just show the shoulder section, to include a bit of greenery, like this:

But if I’m completely honest, I should probably upload a picture like this, to give some sort of scale:

Unfortunately that isn’t a giant’s gate. That fence is about 1.8m in height.

I planted all of the sunflowers in pots to start with, and most grew to under a metre tall. I tranplanted one out the front of my house – into what passes for soil, as far as the designers of my housing estate are concerned – and it managed about 30cm in height before it flowered and promptly died.

I took a couple of the more withered ones to the allotment very late, and they didn’t grow much in height, before dying off. However, one of the ex-pot ones, I planted at home next to the compost bin. Check this out:

Not bad, eh?

I’m pretty happy with that really. So are the bees.

I planted it without compost, in pretty crap soil, and right by the fence. The soil at the fence isn’t very deep, and is full of bits of tarmac (as that’s what is on the other side of the fence). Maybe it had the right light, or the right drainage or something, because it can’t have had the right soil, and it was given a bit of a beating every time we needed access to the compost bin.