The Great Sunflower Project

Gretchen prompts us to observe sunflowers for bees as soon as possible, but in central Maine sunflowers are LATE summer flowers commonly open with the arrival of local sweet corn. And corn is just beginning to tassel, so first sunflowers will mostly be mid August blooms and later. Often sunflowers are still blossoming in October here where ripe sunflower seed are always a risky crop.

But we have one bedraggled tiny sunflower head from a black oil sunflower seed that birds dropped near our feeders. The plant is only 15 inches tall and the flower head has maybe 60 florets with 20 ray florets on the margin. Not many pollinators visit that plant. Nice vigorous plants do not yet even show the enlarging bracts around the receptacle down among the leaves atop the stalk. Long time yet until flowers.

We planted 200 sunflower seeds of 4 varieties. Some did not germinate; at least they did not sprout to the surface. Many were probably eaten by corn seed maggots that infested our garden for 2 generations. Those maggots nibbled many seeds below ground and even some just emerging from the soil. Other plants including sunflowers were damaged and destroyed by slugs and cutworms. From 200 seeds we have two plants that may produce flower heads in August. But black oil seeds dropped by birds at feeders germinated randomly across the yard and those plants, although spindly and quite tiny, will soon blossom with heads mostly smaller than the one described above.

Today we tallied at least 5 different flies gathering pollen at different perennials and annuals in flower and vegetable gardens. The flies were accompanied by 2 sorts of bumblebees, 2-3 different green sweat bees, honeybees, 3 different solitary bees of other sorts, and probably 6 different wasps. Our pollinator diversity is great, now we need sunflowers to suitably attract pollinators for the Great Sunflower Project.