I forgot to mention two feature enhancements we made to the sunflowers a while ago. Firstly, we got some copper tape which allegedly gives slugs and snails an electric shock (!) when they come into contact with it - and that’s taped around all the sunflower pots now. Since then there’s been a marked reduction in nocturnal eating, so it seems to work!

Also, due to the numerous falling-over incidents (many logged here) we gave the pots a little more weight with some old bricks which were lying around in the dustbin area. In case Uncle Terry ever reads this, the bricks are from Marston! Again, this non-technical solution has proved highly effective.

Oh, if you’re wondering about the little pot on the brick, it contains a tiny conifer I found growing in the corner of a fuschia pot when we repotted it the other day. Nancy hates conifers so I don’t know what to do with it but just binning it was not an option! I might take it to the office and put it on my desk. Don’t think there’s anything in my contract preventing me growing trees.

Due to real life taking over for a while, predominantly preparations for an event on October 2nd that most of the regular readership already know about , I’ve not had time to blog stuff. The sunflowers requiring (ideally) water three or four times a day (their little pots can’t hold much) also eats away at my spare time.

Suffice to say that everything’s doing well (erm, except the pansies). More on that later when I get a spare hour.

The nasturtiums (which have been almost forgotten in sunflower one’s time of need) are snaking their way across the patio in two different directions. So much so that another pot reshuffle was required to stop other things from being climbed all over by them. Their seed pods are also getting quite massive and numerous, which is very encouraging for next year’s growth. There are literally hundreds of flowers now, and roughly that number of seed pods.

Given that I started with no more than a couple of dozen seeds and now have this sprawling mass dominating the patio, I think they’ll be in every spare corner next summer!

Here’s an attempted arty shot of all three of the flowers. Some improvement required!

Number two’s flower continues to grow and the petals have pretty much straightened up now.

Nancy decided that she could do a better job of splinting number one using some rather fetching and appropriately green-coloured ribbon, to replace my Heath Robinson lash-up involving part of an old cereal box (left). The results (right) were a distinct improvement, and number one now has (we believe) sufficient support to prevent the head from completely snapping off.

Despite the desperate look about him, number one is a hardly fellow - as you can see by the fact that despite the damage his head is still craning upwards towards the sun. Down, but not out!

And amongst all the excitement number three has also flowered now. Hooray! You can see him as the left-most sunflower in the middle picture.

No pictures yet (I dashed out this morning to water the sunflowers less than 8 minutes before the train was due - it was late anyway so I needn’t've bothered rushing), but battle-scarred number one has yellow bits showing now, and should be flowering in the next couple of days.

Today, number two has flowered! Hooray! Isn’t he lovely?

Sunflower two now has yellow bits showing, which means he is very nearly ready to flower!

In other news, sunflower four has today reached the heady heights of 283cm, which is 9 foot 3 inches in old money. He’s now so tall that I can’t measure him by standing on a chair any more - I had to get a stepladder from the garage! He has grown 40cm in just seven days, which is nearly 7cm per day.

My dad has very kindly given me a dead allium. Now, being given dead flowers by people isn’t generally something to be proud of, but the purpose here is to collect the seeds from it as they fall off and then plant them. This, therefore, is the first confirmed project for Geek Gardener 2005!

The allium flower is fairly crispy already and lots of seeds have fallen off. I am keeping it in the Woolworths bag it was supplied in until next Spring when I will plant them. You can see loads of black seeds still on the flower, with the ones that have already fallen off in a crease in the bag the right-hand side of the picture.

Alliums seem to come in lots of different shapes and sizes, though if I remember correctly, this allium flower was a purple ball about the size of a tennis ball in its prime. Looking around the Internet at pictures, there seem to be dozens of varieties of alliums, and “allium” is Latin for onions! This one is an ornamental (ie. non-edible) variety. I think it is an Allium aflatunense and hopefully mine will look something like these.

It will be a long-term project too, since they don’t seem to do much in the first year, which means that their estimated flowering time will be April 2006. I wonder if I’ll still be weblogging this stuff then?

I have removed the plastic covers from the two buoyant pansy tubs. The third one remains covered in the vain hope that more of them will germinate.

No pictures since they look so similar to the last time they were photographed.

Whilst number four continues to strive towards the Guinness World Record of 7.76 m (25 ft 5 in), number two is the star performer from a looks point-of-view.

Not only is his flower the biggest of the lot (though none of them have opened up yet), but it’s also developed a bonus bud two-thirds of the way up his trunk!

This kind of offsets the earlier bad news about number one.

As promised, here’s a couple of shots of the nasturtiums rampaging their way across the patio. They have grown into and around all their neighbours - to the extent that I have to keep shuffling the fushia in the blue pot a few inches to the left every weekend.

I think it’s fairly clear that a round pot was not the best choice for these lovely things, since the ones in the middle have to fight for light and water and are therefore a bit dog-eared. If I do them next year I think I’ll get some long, thin troughs for them.

Time for another measuring session. Unfortunately Nancy wasn’t around so I had to measure single-handedly - slightly tricky when said activity involves balancing on the aforementioned garden chair and a metal tape-measure that determinedly won’t stay straight. Anyway:

• Sunflower One: 236cm
• Sunflower Two: 228cm
• Sunflower Three: 212cm
• Sunflower Four: 246cm

For those listening in black-and-white, sunflower four is an astonishing (to me at least) eight foot and one inch tall.

I’ve been working late and also been a bit lazy so I’ve not shown recently how the nasturtiums have multiplied.

Here’s a quick dark shot - I’ll get some decent ones at the weekend in the daylight.

The sunflowers’ buds are getting bigger and bigger. I hope they’ll open up within the next couple of weeks.

These shots were taken from the ground, well, from close to the ground: me balancing precariously on one of the garden chairs.

At last, all of the sunflowers are starting to form their trademark flowers! It’s almost impossible to see this from the ground so I headed upstairs to the spare room and took a couple of shots of them from there. I feel that these sunflowers have taken on a whole new presence now that I can see the top of them better from upstairs than from the garden or the kitchen.

Sunflower four’s bud is the least well developed. I think this is because he’s still devoting his energies to growing as tall as possible, rather than diverting precious fuel to being pretty. I am happy with this arrangement.

They are all well above the tops of their canes now, which is slightly concerning, but we have been careful to keep them well watered to avoid drooping. Given that their trunks are now about an inch in girth I think they will be fine unsupported. Quite where I’d find canes three metres long anyway is beyond me, since my Dad doesn’t have any.

The nasturtiums are really rampant now - sprawling all over the edge of the patio, and also snaking through into the territory of other plants. And, best of all, there are about a dozen flowers!

There are a lovely mixture of red, yellow and (mainly) orange colours. My favourite flower is the yellow one in the middle with its red flashes. Purdy!

The pansies are just over two weeks old.

	Two of the boxes have been sitting on the windowsill for a fortnight, and they seem to be doing just fine and have poked up lots of cute little leaves.
However, the third (in the middle here) has been in the pantry, and is looking rather sorry for itself, having produced just two measly straggly anaemic-looking plants.
	I am hoping that a move to the sunny window will perk these up but it’s rather disappointing to have a net haul of only two plants! Ironically, these are the “normal” pansies (the others are slightly more unusual varieties) which I expected to be the easiest to grow.

Rather astonishingly, sunflower four is now at least two inches taller than I am!

Sunflower four is the one nearest me, furthest from the camera. Oddly, sunflower one, nearest to the camera, looks about eight foot tall due to the perspective of the shot. I can assure you it isn’t though, much as I’d like it to be! My dad made me slightly jealous by pointing out that a workmate of his had sunflowers that are ten feet tall. But that’s a bloke who works in a garden centre and has experience. It’s certainly something to aim for in the future, but I don’t think I’ve done bad for a beginner. And they are still growing!

You can also see here the string that we tied from the tomato stand to the drainpipe - this is to stop them falling over in the wind (number one took a tumble a couple of days ago, thankfully without damage).

We went to Van Hage yesterday, principally to pick up some longer canes for the sunflowers. However, whilst pottering around there I was unable to resist buying some more seeds.

So I now have some pansies! I got three packets - a mixed pack of pansies, and two unusual-looking ones, one which claims to produce blank pansies and the other green pansies.

	Here are the new trays we bought for them
	The seeds
	Really the seeds. They’re tiny!
	And the finished contraptions. One of them had instructions to store “excluding light” so it’s into the pantry with that one for a fortnight. The other two have gone on the breakfast room windowsill where the sunflowers and nasturtiums had their formative weeks.

The nasturtiums have finally produced some flowers!

There’s this one:

And, hiding behind a lot of leaves there’s this other one (see my hand holding back the leaves to be able to get a shot):

Gratified to find all the sunflowers still standing and not snapped or otherwise ravaged by the wind, I decided it was about time to take another set of measurements.

Sunflower One: 125cm Sunflower Two: 123cm Sunflower Three: 119cm Sunflower Four: 117cm

This changes the order of the previous measurements which had Two a couple of inches taller than One. That they are now in proper descending order pleases me somewhat. I’m also slightly flabbergasted that they’re 40% taller than they were just seventeen days ago.

It’s been very windy today, and despite my initial fears for the sunflowers, the nasturtiums seemed to have suffered worse, with the side facing the garden in a rather sorry state. Their new neighbour the fuschia was also listing about 20 degrees to starboard (which I corrected prior to the photograph).

Hopefully there’ll be no lasting effects and a nice bit of sun will perk them up tomorrow.

I have just discovered, by doing a Google Image search for “nasturtium“, that nasturtiums are edible! I’m not sure what to think about that, nor whether I shall indulge when or if they flower…

I remembered today that one of the most exciting aspects of growing sunflowers at school was measuring their height on a regular basis and plotting their progress on a line graph (I’m a geek, remember?)

Unfortunately I’ve not been measuring them regularly, but here are today’s:

• Sunflower One: 82cm
• Sunflower Two: 90cm
• Sunflower Three: 68cm
• Sunflower Four: 64cm

Interestingly, number two has overtaken number one (they are numbered in the order in which they first emerged from under the compost).

They also have new canes (courtesy of Mr Batty) and are recovering well after yesterday’s falling-over ordeal. Number three’s leaves are all pointing in sensible directions once more.

1989-2004

Last pictures from three weekends ago:

(second link is a 668K movie: about 2 minute download on a modem)

It just rained for half an hour, and, given that the slugs and snails seem to like coming out in the wet, I thought that it would be wise to go and check that the nasturtiums weren’t being attacked again.

Thankfully I didn’t find any active attacks going on, but I did discover some very suspicious behaviour. I decided to fetch my Maglite just to have a better scout around, and I was horrified to discover the scale of the problem going on under the cover of darkness.

Witness here no less than three snails heading towards the nasturtiums (in the terracotta pot in the background):

These two were playing football with a stone.			Whilst this one was cavorting about on the sundial.
Worse was going on in the rockery amongst Nancy’s alpines - in fact some parts of it resembled a snail-orgy. Also, this was where I found the one and only slug (I was expecting to find loads).			Whilst other bits looked like a massacre had gone on, seemingly with gooey bits of goo just dripping off the leaves.

I couldn’t just stand back and let this happen, so I chose to dispose of some of them by easing them carefully off whatever they were munching on and chucking them over the fence into the undergrowth behind our garden. I’m fairly sure that this isn’t particularly healthy for them - and I felt a pang of guilt when I heard the first couple hit the ground in the distance. However, after a while I began to get a taste for it and enjoyed throwing them progressively further, higher and harder. This probably means I’m a bad person.

In fact, I’m definitely a bad person because this hunting sport became rather addictive and it wasn’t until I released that it was nearly one in the morning and I’d spent 45 minutes out there evicting 92 snails from my property that I saw reason and came back indoors. I rest assured though that that particular motley crew won’t trouble the nasturtiums tonight. Of course there are probably hundreds more lurking unseen biding their time to avenge their buddies’ deportations but you have to start somewhere.

Yes, you read that right, I hurled 92 snails. I’m not sure which is more worrying - the fact that I hurled 92 snails or the fact that I counted every single one of them.

Unfortunately number four is showing some signs of damage at the base of her stem from yesterday’s falling over. Some of the tissue has gone all yucky where it was bent over sideways. Hopefully this will heal up over the next few days.

I’ve been naughty and not taking many pictures recently. Two weeks later though, and things are looking really lively.

Here are the nasturtiums. Notice that even the floppy looking ones have perked up and are now looking healthy. These pictures were taken at 9pm - so about 3 hours after they lost direct sunlight.
	The sunflowers are looking a bit parched though after two days in hot hot sun, and the falling-over incident yesterday.

After a day that allegedly got to 31^oC I got home tonight to find some severe wilting in all of the sunflowers, despite them having had a good drenching last night. I had to pick them all up from the various angles to which they had wilted and prop them up again with new sticks and string. I gave them a good drink too.

Sturtiums are OK.

No pictures - it’s too dark.

Five and six are, well, dead. I need to throw them away really.

Two days outside and sunflowers one and three seem to be liking life.
	As are two and four.

Four is definitely the baby.

Sunflowers five and six don’t look like they are going to make it.

I have however replanted them in the original tray thingie and given them a good drink. I’m not holding out much hope though.

Next up I moved the sunflowers, we bought four smaller pots for each of the healthy sunflowers. Here’s number one naked (apart from his stick):

And here’s number two safely re-potted:

One and three in their new homes, under the kitchen window next to some other plant thingies:

And here are two and four, a few feet away:

Note that one, two and three all need new sticks as they’ve outgrown their current ones (which are actually chopsticks). Four doesn’t have a stick at the moment since she’s doing fine without.

I moved the Nasturtiums first. After filling a huge pot with compost and prodding a couple of dozen holes in it, I moved them by carefully uprooting them from their tray with an old teaspoon:

Some of them had quite big roots:

Despite my size I can be delicate!:

And here they are in their new home:

I have to say that they look a little ragged and unwell. Although after such a major operation (and they were a little parched anyway before I started) I’m not that surprised. Hopefully the gallon of water I just drenched them in will help them recover.

Here they are outside awaiting their move to new outside pots. We went to Van Hage’s and bought terracotta pots and a load of compost.

I’m going to re-pot them tomorrow - they’ve about outgrown their current homes:

The Sunflowers are looking groovy and healthy though!

The sunflowers have finally sprouted! This may have been any time in the past 4 days since I ignored them for a while given that nothing was happening. I think it’s the sunflowers; but they might be nasturtiums since I can’t remember which tub is which and I don’t know what either looks like when only a few days old.

Two of them seem very happy, if rather yellow, but the third one to have popped up seems to be some sort of mutoid sunflower/furry/maggotmonster, and the fourth seems to have come up, decided it didn’t like it in the open air, and then ducked back down undercover ostrich-style. Since the box says to put them in the light when “small shoots appear” I’ve put the sunflowers on the windowsill. On my Dad’s advice I dug up sunflower three and replanted him, since it seems like I may have planted him upside-down in the first place, hence the weird mutant growth pattern. No sign of anything happening with the nasturtiums, so they’re still in the pantry in the dark.

Nothing, predictably, has happened. The compost is still moist so I’ve not watered them.