And finally for today, an update on the crisis zone which is sunflower number one. His head still sits at an alarming angle, but doesn’t seem to be getting any worse. And even better news is that no less than four additional flowers are on the way! You can see three of them here:

He does look most peculiar - with his listing head now a foot below three new sprouts (the fourth is slightly lower down, just visible in the lower picture). There are also other blooms forming in some of the crevices between the trunk and the leaves - it’ll be interesting to see if any of them flower (most are tiny). Only sunflowers one and two (the ones which have had “issues") have these - three and four each only have the one flower. I presume therefore that trauma at the top can prompt interesting stuff lower down.

The temptation to cut off his head is greater than ever before!

Four is in his prime now. Beautiful thing, with his flower now fully developed. He is however a little saggy in this picture due to it being a hot day. When it’s warm, since they are so large and their pots are so small, they’ll sag unless watered every couple of hours, which is obviously impractical when we’re both at work. Ah well.

Next year I intend to grow them in the ground rather than in pots which straight away eliminates the watering and falling-over problems. Not sure how I’ll keep the slugs off them though!

I’ve begun dead-heading the nasturtiums. The flowers are beautiful but they have a limited life-span, and in order to help other flowers grow I must regularly remove the dead ones.

Today’s regular “aren’t they pretty?” picture therefore also shows in the background a very dead one. This one was removed shortly after the picture was taken. There are still squillions left so it won’t be missed.

Having shed most of it’s lovely yellow petals, number two’s flower is reaching the end of it’s natural life, and my thoughts now turn to what to do with him. The Internet, of course, knows all things, and the perceived group wisdom is that I should chop off the heads when the backs of them start to go brown, store it in the garage in a bag (just like with the alliums), and wait for all the seeds to fall out. I shall check this with my Dad when he gets back from Austria.

Number two’s back is not brown, which means I get to put off the inevitable beheading for a bit longer. I have to say that I’m not looking forward to it, however, the passing of the big flower will give the secondary flower a better chance of getting some water, so that’s kind of OK. As you can see here, the secondary bloom on number two is a pretty little thing, even if it does look more of a daisy than a sunflower! Thanks to him not being very heavy he’s not suffered stunted petal growth from resting on a leaf. He therefore uniquely sits proudly undamaged.