Reach For The Sky

I love sunflowers. We used to grow them like crazy before we moved to Texas.

But since coming to Texas, we have been completely unable to make these things grow. There are a lot more trees here than where I used to live, which makes a lot more shade, so it might be the difficulty in finding enough sun for the sunflowers. I don't know. 

I had mostly given up on them. However, my wife insisted that we plant some this year again. We put in the seeds, and the shoots started coming up.

Then the other day, I was walking past a school in my neighborhood and I saw this:

Local school kids planted sunflowers in their garden boxes, and they've grown amazingly. Check out this one:

Look at that one in the middle of all of that. It's got to be at least ten feet tall! It hasn't even grown its flower up there yet.

Here's what our flowers look like right now:

Next year, I'm going to change things. Obviously, we are planting things way too late. I suspect those school kids planted their sunflowers in February, March at the latest. We planted ours on the last week of April, almost May.

Sadly, I have to wait till next year. I'm hoping that the flowers we planted this year will manage to survive. We'll see how it goes.