Sunflowers and Successions

June 4th was all about starting our sunflowers and succession planting Zinnias, Celosia, and Cress. The germination rate on the zinnias is awesome. I talk about this and have photos of those in this post.

I do not have a great germination rate on Celosia, but we did succession plant the remaining seeds. After getting the seeds in the ground, I sprinkled Flower-Tone over the area and watered them in. The plants that did germinate look great. I’ve mentioned before the size of these celosia seeds makes it really difficult to direct sow and as proof, when I mentioned that it would be completely possible that I would have no seeds in a hole or several. The photo below is a perfect example of the several. At this point, I do not plan to thin any plants yet. I’ll let them continue to grow then determine if I need to separate or thin them later. For now, they seem to be ok.

3 celosia plants in one spot. This definitely happened because of the challenge of handling the seeds. These plants are 19 days from when they were direct sown.

My husband took care of planting the sunflowers. We have a total of 4 different kinds but only planted 3 in this planting. We have ProCut Peach, ProCut White Nite, and ProCut Red Lemon bicolor. Inspired by Pepper Harrow, my husband bought an Earthway Precision Garden Seeder. He also just likes buying toys and gadgets, so it didn’t take much inspiration. He used the sweet corn plate in the seeder and mixed all three varieties together. It didn’t matter to us to keep the different types separated. He then walked his little push toy up and down the 25’ row multiple times. Like all the others, I added Flower-tone on top of the bed and watered them in. The plan had been for him to plant one row in the bed not the entire bed so we could succession plant in that row, but apparently, he missed that part or strategically chose not to listen at that time. 😊 I hope all my family and friends love sunflowers, because if all these germinate and flower at the same time, we are going to have a couple hundred sunflowers all at once. I do have to admit that although I’m not yet convinced the seeder did a great job on seed spacing, the plants are in a much more even row than any of the others that I’ve done!