It’s been a rough summer for my little sunflower garden. A neighborhood mama rabbit and her four babies did a lot of damage to the young plants, consuming their little leaves. This picture was taken on June 24th.
AND, as if being eaten by the bunny family wasn’t enough for them to endure, nasty little weevils hit at the same time. I’d never seen a we-evil before but the name is appropriate! I took a couple of the infested leaves to our local garden center for anti-rabbit and weevil advice.
We picked up a shaker of stinky granular bits and spread them ALL over the garden. Oh, it lived up to the claim on the label: STINKY. It doesn’t hurt the rabbits, but the smell drives them away from the delicious, tender, young sunflower leaves and into one of our unsuspecting neighbor’s yards…Shh!
The weevils were given a good spray with an organic soap concoction
applied on the underside of the leaves. After a few daily rounds of the spray, they were gone.
I took this pic on July 7, a cloudy afternoon, in between light rain showers. On the west (left) end of the garden, the tallest sunflower is about 5 feet. In the middle, where the rabbits viciously dined, the poor plants range in height from about 6 inches to a few feet. The half eaten plants were definitely stunted, we won’t have as many large blooms this year.
She is not impressed with the anti-rabbit stinky granules.
Red and YELLOW Lady Bugs galore!
I also planted “Evening Sun Mixed Colors” sunflowers from a package this year
but only 4 or 5 have grown. Can’t wait to see
what sunset colors this sunflower will reveal.
The leaves and stems on these plants are very different from those of the traditional
yellow sunflowers we see in Kansas.
We just can’t get enough of the
yellow sunflowers. I can’t wait to see them in full bloom! Hopefully some will be huge this year
but I’m guessing we’ll have more of the smaller, multi-bloom plants this summer.
This was our garden last summer, 2022. And yes, sunflowers DO follow the sun, they were facing due east the morning I took this picture. We had a variety of 8 to 9 foot tall sunflowers with one large bloom while other stalks had multiple blooms. Look closely at the picture to see both types.
They are truly are magnificent and inspired all of
Marc’s Sunflower Charcoal Drawings and Oil Paintings.
Take a moment and look at his work in
The Sunflower Gallery, Shop for Sunflower prints and Stickers!
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