Specialty Gardening: SUNFLOWER CONTEST..no rules, just post yours!, 1 by Jaywhacker

Jaywhacker wrote:
Last year, I planted a variety of sunflowers, mostly the 6 ft tall type. This year, I have volunteers popping up in strange places around the yard and in containers.

In this photo, you can just barely see a sunflower bloom peeking in from the left side. Just to the left of the slanted tree on the right you can see a small volunteer about 8 inches tall. In the stacked containers in the center of the picture are two flowering sunflowers growing from the top of two container stacks. The shorter one on the left with all the small blooms was probably planted by a bird. The 6 footer on the right I transplanted from a pot. I keep deadheading the smaller one and it just keeps pumping out blooms. I guesstimate about 20 blooms so far. The tall one has flowers blooming about 10 feet in the air. It can be seen by passersby from the road sticking up there above the 6 ft tall privacy fence. Those sunflowers are not staked or supported in any way, just their roots growing in the top pot of the stack (each pot is 2 1/2 gallons). Last night, strong winds did not blow them down but did blow over an 8 ft tall stack with tomato's growing out of the top pot.

If you look close in the top part of the photo you can see a bird. I figger he is the one planting all the sunflowers and came back to look at this handiwork.