I couldn't resist! I woke up this morning feeling the urge to do some creative non fiction writing, and my thoughts immediately turned to gardening. I feel like I haven't written a gardening article for publication in quite some time. As I drove down the driveway this morning, I saw a cloud of goldfinches rise from the towering sunflowers along the southern side of the house, and thus an article was born. Researching this topic was a lot of fun, too; I learned that the sunflower is one of the most popular flowers to grow, and did you know it actually removes arsenic, lead and other horrible stuff from the soil? Japan is now encouraging farmers around the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster to plant sunflowers, and sunflower helped reclaim land spoiled by the Chernobyl disaster because they actually remove cessium and uranium from the soil (all of this from Wikipedia and the National Sunflower Association.)
Truly magnificent plants and now beloved additions to my garden every year. I grow them for their beauty and to feed the birds; do you grow them? Do you eat the seeds or save them for the birds?
Please enjoy my latest article here:
About Sunflowers-Grow Sunflower Plants
(All of the photos today are ones I took of plants in my garden.)
1 comments:
Beautiful sunflowers. They are such hardy plants. Nice to hear they do such good things too. We have a gold finch that is enjoying some bugs off our sunflowers. I only have our native wild sunflowers growing (not the ones that make seeds we can eat). I let them self seed and have to remove the extras that creep into places where they won't have room.
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