Crop Failures: Part 1

Let me preface this mini series with a perky disclaimer: I do not consider my garden to be a failure. I have had a delightful time planting it and watching it grow. I have no regrets. Nor am I depressed by my failures.

At the same time, however, I recognize that I am not a farmer. I just live on a far.
I have minimal gardening talents, and am still honing my gardening skills.

As a result, not everything went as planned in the garden. Like when the lettuce started sprouting flowers. Yeah, I didn't expect that. I kind of thought we would eat it all before that happened. But, we really didn't eat as much of it as I thought we would. But, ultimately I would consider this one to be a farming success because I gathered seeds from these flowers, and now I have seeds for next year. That's 20 less cents worth of seeds for the garden budget next year. haha


Anyway - down to business. My first gardening failure:
My Sunflowers

First the good news -
I didn't expect these to grow at all, but they did. Yay!
In fact, they got HUGE! That one really big one must be close to 18" across. Yikes!
They were really pretty looking
I got some sweet pictures out of these flowers.

Now the bad news -
I was hoping to collect some seeds from these sweet flowers. I read a few websites about when and how to dry and harvest sunflower seeds. I was totally prepped. On the day that I cleared out the garden I cut the flowers off like I was supposed to. And while I was preparing to hang them somewhere to dry, I noticed they looked kind of funny. Kind of not like sunflower seeds. Perhaps I just do not know what they should have looked like - I haven't seen a genuine sunflower close up in a long time. Then I noticed that one of them had bugs in it. Like all over the place in it. And another one had weird rotting brown spots on the back.

So, in summary, I have no idea if I could actually succeed in drying these and getting seeds out of them. But the bugs and the rot and the all around heaviness of the flower heads, has led me to the decision to not bother trying.

Thanks for a lovely summer, Sunflowers, but its dumpster time.