Living on thin moss

Some sort of sunflower appears to have found just enough of a foothold in the moss on a stone wall. I’ve been wrong before about “sunflowers“, but it’s too high up for me to see anything but a yellow composite flower.  It might as well be a sunflower. It even seems to like the heat!

Sunflowers keep on giving

I come to praise my sunflowers, not to pull them up and compost them. When they were blooming, the sunflowers offered pollen to the bees. When they were dying, seeds to the goldfinches. The plants have finished dying and dried up, but they’re not done.

Do Bees Sleep?

I’ve been wondering if bees sleep since I saw all these black bees zooming about in the early evening. They seemed to be chasing each other. Then they clustered on a few stalks of grass, jostling and fighting for the good spots, until they finally settled down.
When I looked them up, I was told they [...]

Wrong again

Just because it’s in the swath where I scattered sunflower seeds doesn’t mean this is a sunflower. I can understand mistaking a syrphid fly for a bee, or hemp dogbane for milkweed, or the various other misidentifications I have made. But you’d think I’d recognize a Black-Eyed Susan when every summer I walk around admiring [...]

The sunflower is dead, long live the sunflower

Already that huge sunflower has gone from a feast for bees to a feast for goldfinches.

Sunflowers are feeding bees

Presenting the big-ass sunflower that was just a tall weed that I hoped was a sunflower about a month ago. If you look close enough, you might see the bee on its face. And what’s the bee here for?

My Volunteer Army

You never know what’s going to turn up. This sunflower is one of at least three that decided to plant themselves in my yard. And none of them are the sprouts in the compost tub.

Sunflowers are sprouting (I think)

Remember the potato in the worm bin? Today, I uncovered the latest batch of compost only to find these huge seedlings cheerily hoping for a bit of sun. They’re so big, they’ve got to be sunflowers. At least I hope so.