Earlier this year, I planted some sunflower seeds and then promptly forgot about them.
By the time I remembered, they had grown to around two feet tall and were all crammed together in one pot. I decided the sensible thing to do would be to separate them into individual pots, at which point every single one immediately wilted and looked as though I had killed it.
This probably tells you everything you need to know about my gardening technique.
Somehow, though, most of them survived. Not because I followed a carefully researched growing plan or knew what I was doing, but seemingly through a combination of water, sunshine and their own determination to live.
They grew, they flowered and, for a while, they made the yarden look properly summery. Then we introduced an Akita puppy into the mix.
Kaizer didn’t destroy all of them, but he did chew through several stems as part of his ongoing investigation into whether absolutely everything in the garden is edible. I’m not sure his pruning technique would be recommended by the Royal Horticultural Society, but a surprising number of the sunflowers survived him too.
Today I picked the final flowers and brought them indoors so I can enjoy them in a vase for a little while longer. The other heads that had already finished flowering have been cut off and put aside to dry. I’m hoping to save some of the seeds for next year, although I still don’t know whether they will grow into the same kind of sunflowers. Apparently that depends on whether they were F1 hybrids, which is another gardening term I have learned several months later than would have been useful.
So, what have I learned for next year?
I should probably remember that I’ve planted the seeds. I should separate them before they reach two feet tall. I might even label them so I know what variety they are. Or perhaps the wing-and-a-prayer method is exactly why they did so well.
Either way, these are the last of this year’s sunflowers. They survived questionable gardening skills, an unnecessarily dramatic transplanting episode and a puppy with absolutely no respect for horticulture.
They are now sitting in a vase in my house and The Chelsea Flower Show is shitting itself.