The place to share your GTS seed grow out observations and harvest with photos. Remember to save seeds and send in a few handfulls for next years mix. All crosses and colors welcome. What have you grown so far?
I started with an heirloom mix of seeds and just keep adding to the jar. And yes, there are bean seeds inside the jar with the sunflowers, I plant pole beans with them so the beans have a trellis. I also plant them with the cowpeas, it just depends on the season and what I grab to plant. Plenty of legumes spaced throughout the garden really helps build the soil.
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We just put our seeds in to start indoors, and the plot is almost protected from ground squirrels. We’ll be planting in the north third of the research plot (which now has a fence, a buried metal panel to keep them from tunneling in from the north, and a net over the top after the ground squirrels ate the research twice last year. Including maturing hot peppers. I’m going to add an internal fence so that once the sunflowers are big enough to resist being eaten, we can pull the net back from that row.
We’re growing a mix of this year’s GTS mix, saved Hopi Black Dye and Apache Brown Stripe (commingled last year), and trying to get a seed crop from Snowy Sunflowers (h. Niveus). My colleague is investigating the photosynthetic efficiency of various sunflowers under drought stress conditions, and this will be the first time that he has investigated a diverse population of h. Annuus.
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I’m glad I’m not the only one with a fence and baracaded garden space. Ground varments and birds are my greatest challenge to grow plants. Its not just random animals here or there…its like the plague when the whole lot of them attacking the garden. And they do eat everything. Not enough predators, or they are too habituated to people and have no fear. With dryer conditions too, my garden is an oasis of delicious food for them. I just cant feed them all.
Your mix is awesome for a swarm. They are all good seed producers as well.
Didn’t get a picture, but caught a ground squirrel sitting on top of the net this evening. They have to move pretty carefully up there - I might try a little bit of hazing to see if they decide that’s too exposed of a hangout.
…maybe a noise scarecrow, cans or a wind chime?
Great, sunflowers have my attention since finally getting some great seeds through GTS exchanges. Normally here they’re just snail food, but somehow they did great last year. I was aiming at nothing, but got interested in growing them for oil through a documentary i saw about them.
I tried some deliberate crosses in the hoop house between bigger headed ones or multiheaded ones and those with different colors. Just moving pollen from one onto the other with a ear cotton swab.
Outside i let nature go and don’t know if many crosses appeared from bees or something, but i saved seeds from the biggest heads, one in particular.
I’m planning on having different spots with them for different populations.
One to see what came of the deliberate crosses and one to see if i can get more big headed ones. I think having some reds in there will make it more appealing, but if not that’s ok too.
Beautiful big heads can appear in the other population with the deliberate crosses. Which i might use then again to recross. Whatever!
I’ve gathered some Peruvian seeds as well. We’ll see what traits those carry.
Having fun and moving towards abundance while creating beauty, how much better gardening can get?
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So very pleasant to hear from your growing observations from another continent. So very glad your able to grow all sorts of vegetables and fruit trees. Im waiting for the day we can easily share seeds.
Sunflowers for oil was a goal I had but finding a smallish press to extract the oil that I could manage for myself is proving to be a great task. So, i gave up on the oil and moved towards tasty flowers and seeds. I saw on youtube how a Ukrainian dish was made from an immature flower head, marinated and cooked like a burger. Very delicious, and I favor seeds with good meats inside. However, then I skipped about two years from growing, so I have to catch up. My corn patch was planted first this season instead of sunflowers. Im working on scaling up another 1/8 of an acre for growing grains. All by hand, no tractor within the budget.
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Very interesting way of learning to live with what grows, eating the meaty flower bit. Yes getting expensive machinerie can be a problem, community can solve that, but that’s harder to grow then plants. But i’m derailing the growing report.
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No worries, eating the harvest and utilizing for a culinary dish is just as necessary as growing. We select from the plants what we like to eat. For sunflowers its the oil, tasty seeds, or eating the whole flower head. My community is still awakening to fresh foods. There isn’t many growers who appreciate organic food, or tasty vegetables. Our farmers market has two organic growers and one commercial. We have three, almost gourmet restaurants that have salty food and a cocktail. One of the chefs did try fresh edible flowers for a time. We need foodie type customers who seek good food. Commercial farming is all around, lettuce, dates, broccoli, citrus, kale, cabbage, wheat and heavily fertilized and sprayed. Im not able to scale up due to lack of irrigation and labor. I grow what I can and save seeds.
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