Sunflower Report 2.0

Recently made some progress. Since the time the seeds were planted, there have been varmints going after the sunflowers, so I started planting more seedlings, then more varmints, then more seedlings.

So it’s been a battle against vampire rabbits, the black squirrel of death from the front yard, and maybe even racoons, and more.

But I decided not to give up, and instead just planted some seedlings later, tried spraying a few different things, and in the case of a new experiment in the front yard, had some help from parental units in constructing a fence to protect things (after a pernicious varmint had the cheek to completely destroy the wonderfully large, well relatively tall sunflower growing there.)

Here is the little round stone enclosure where I had a nice 18 inch sunflower growing that got snagged, then father parental unit employed his upstate ny varmint protection ability to construct a circular wire “fence” with “bunny fence” from home depot — smaller at the bottom, bigger holes at the top, not too entirely bad looking. So hopefully this will prevent the varmints from attacking, and eventually passers by will be able to enjoy a nice sunflower, and maybe the sunflowers will reach down and smack the naughty yappy dogs in the hindquarters and get some discipline going in this neighborhood.

Here we see the main area of last years’ garden. More modest this year, with some 18″ inch or so seedlings, then some newer ones to replace those taken out by vampire rabbits.

Wait a second — who is that peeking out of the crawlspace?

And here is the view of the eldest sunflowers, maybe 2 feet tall, doing fairly well — these might have a chance of reaching six feet by the end of the growing season.

Here are some of the experimental sunflowers, growing in pots — on the left, doing pretty well — the others not so well, but may put them in the ground anyway.

Here we see a pot-based sunflower doing fairly well, and the back-up vampire rabbit scarecrow.

Here’s a nice hosta near the back of the yard, vying for attention. Kind of amazing to see how fast hosta grows.

This year I branched out a bit. Last year I got lucky, the season had more sun, less varmints. But this year, I decided to dig a trench, work the soil, and try planting some sunflowers here — they’ve been attacked by all manner of beasties — but there are some shorter ones that are replacements, just planted today. Am tempted to try some fencing, may do so at the first sign of predatory behavior on the part of bugs and beasties.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 7:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.