Giants of Summer 2007

Palash just wrote about our beginner's luck last year... These are some pictures of our garden from last year. (I'll also be putting up some from 2005 when we didn't have too much but still some of the flowers were rather nice.)

The first picture here is from the early stages of last year's garden, about a month and a half after we planted the seeds. We were already wondering by this point if we knew exactly what we were getting into..... The vine had already grown longer than the stakes we had put up for them once, but that's another story and deserves its own post. The sunflowers...their leaves were larger than the ones we had planted in 2005, like about 10 times more. No buds were in sight. Hmmm, we thought, interesting. Looks like we will have more than we anticipated -- how nice!

About a week later, we had this here situation =>:

The creepers were creeping merrily away, and the sunflowers were becoming trees. The employees of Home Depot started to recognize us as the couple who always bought bamboo sticks, no matter what else we bought or didn't buy. The stakes, which had become a little house-like trellis, now evolved into a giant butterfly.

The sunflowers, by the time they decided they were tall enough and could flower, covered our entire window. Our garden could be recognized from the other end of the complex, thanks to the sunflower jungle, and the masses of squirrels visiting this one-stop squirrel bistro. (Check out the size of the smaller sunflowers in the picture on the left: they're the normal 4- to 5-foot high ones. Gives one a sense of the scale, huh?) The vine and the trellis competed gamely all summer, but were beaten by the size and numbers of the sunflowers. The picture of the cypress vine on the side is before the whole trellis filled up and became top-heavy; we just got bored taking pictures from here on out. They were going to just grow longer and thicker right, so why bother?!?



These two took over our garden last summer, but there were others too. Those will appear on another post, later today.