Those of you who have been following this blog from its inception, will already know that we don’t have enough space for a greenhouse and consequently grow all of our tomatoes outdoors. This hasn’t really been a compromise, since there are plenty of posts about the huge mountains of tomatoes we produce from around twenty plants each year.
I guess the main drawback of growing tomatoes outdoors (rather than in a greenhouse) is that all of the tomatoes ripen from September onwards. This produces a huge glut of fruit which invariably gets consumed in lunchtime soups. If we had a large greenhouse then the crop would be spread over the whole of the summer and early autumn, which would have a more positive impact on the day-to-day household budget (why are tomatoes so expensive these days?).
Nevertheless, we’d encourage everyone to grow tomatoes – even if you have just a little space outdoors – since our yields have been amazing. I always feel really proud when I come back from the veg garden with a crate full of home-grown produce. It’s extremely satisfying to grow your own, especially in the summer when – for a short space of time - you get a feeling of what it would be like to be truly self-sufficient.
But the purpose of this post is to talk about our sunflowers, instead of tomatoes.
The sunflowers have been growing where we grew our tomatoes last year – and were chosen as an ornamental infill within our pseudo-rotation system. The variety we chose was Ruby Sunset since the plants are reported to only grow around one metre tall. We therefore thought they’d be great along the back of the border and generally be a better alternative to the huge skyscraper sunflowers that you usually see.
However, the result was that they grew much taller than one metre. In fact, they probably grew taller than the common skyscraper sunflowers. The photo above demonstrates this (try to picture Jack in the Beanstalk).
This end result is disappointing because we chose them for ornamental reasons, and if we’d have known they were going to grow this tall we probably would have chosen a standard sunflower variety instead. At least then the seeds would have been edible. The seeds in the Ruby Sunset flowers are too small for us to warm in a frying pan, crack the shells, and eat the tasty kernel inside. Next year we’ll stick to our rule of giving priory to plants that produce something edible. After all, it’s the City-Smallholder way! (David)
