How are your sunflowers coming along? Ours went out in the garden a couple of weeks ago. The tallest one is up to 45cm on our sunflower height chart and mostly they’re doing well – working their way up the wall but not yet taller than Little. One however has been munched. The girls were horrified! Who had done such a thing? Pulling some ivy off the wall this weekend we found our answer: 14 snails, sat biding their time, waiting for the feasting to begin. I am such a hippy, harmony-promoting gardener that I can’t bring myself to squash them, so they are flung over the back wall (into an alleyway, not someone else’s garden!) – which of course only delays the munching.
Before the snails went for the high jump, we put them through their paces in a Snail Race.
On Your Marks....
This gave the girls the opportunity to look at the snails up close and ask lots of questions about their shells, slime and ‘sticky out bits’. Snail World had all the answers. We talked about our responsibilty to animals and both girls were very careful when handling the snails. One thing we did discover was that snails just don’t understand the concept of keeping in your own lane – so if you fancy trying this I’d suggest more of a ‘bull’s eye’ circular race track, starting all the snails in the centre and seeing which makes it to the circumference first.
Victory to Snail #1
What do you do when you find snails, or slugs, in your garden? Have you got any alternative solutions to stop them munching?
Sunflower Club: We have lift off!
I can’t tell you how excited we were to discover our baby seedlings have popped their heads above the soil. Big and Little were dancing! The plantlets are tiny at the moment but we have high hopes, and to monitor their progress we have made a Sunflower Height Chart.
We started by drawing a leaf for each member of the family, colouring them in and writing our names on them.
Then, using a roll of paper stuck to the side of the fridge, we drew a tall, tall sunflower stalk. We all stood against it to measure how tall we are, and used our leaf to mark our height. This gave us lots of chat about big, small, medium and so on. And about how children grow taller but grown-ups do not.
And then it was the sunflowers’ turn. Big measured them with a ruler and discovered they were 4cm tall already.
Over on the height chart we measured 4 cm up the stalk and coloured it in green. We’ll keep measuring and ‘growing’ our height chart stalk as the plants grow. Maybe the girls will grow over the Summer too. The children are especially excited about the sunflowers growing above their heads. And as Daddy is 6’4” the little seedings have a lot to beat.
This is part of our Sunflower Club project - and it’s never to late to join. There’s still plenty of time to get planting. And if you do and you blog about it, please link up with the MckLinky so we can all see how you’re getting on. Pop over for a look now to see themadhouse’s great idea for using eggshell planters.
Today’s the day – we planted our Sunflower Club seeds! Sunflowers are hardy annuals so you can plant them straight outside from March onwards. We learnt last year however that slugs just love to much straight through juicy, new sunflower stems, felling all your plants and leaving you nothing to grow, so this time we’re starting them off indoors. If you haven’t planted yours yet there’s plenty of time to get them started. Here’s what we did:
We stared off by having a good look at the seeds and drawing them. We’re making a scrapbook to record all our sunflower fun so we recorded today’s date and Big wrote a diary entry to say we’d planted the seeds. We stuck the seed packet in and our seed drawings. Using the scrapbook will give us the opportunity to do lots of writing and drawing and will be a complete story of our growing, from seed through to tall flowers -hopefully!
Then we explored the soil. I asked the girls what it felt like and they said it was crumbly, warm, brown, messy, soft and tickly. We used a spoon to fill the seed tray with the compost – great hand-eye co-ordination practice for Little, who did a geat job and only spilt a bit.
We then put one seed in each cell – counting the seeds as we went along.
We wrote labels so we know what kinds of seeds we’d planted (we’re growing tomatoes and marigolds too). It’s great to let even very young children have a try at writing – you can see from the photo how Big and Little wrote their labels. For Little it’s good for her to try out holding a pencil and ‘writing’ and lovely to see she understands that the marks she’s making have a purpose.
But, what do seeds need to grow? Big thinks they need soil, water and sunshine. Little thinks they might need worms too. We decided to conduct an experiment to find out for sure what they need. Most of the seeds are in compost, on the windowsill and have been watered. We put a couple of the seeds in a dark cupboard to see if they’ll grow without light. A couple more are in compost by the window but we’re not giving them any water. And a couple more are on the windowsill in a glass of water, but no compost. We wonder what will happen to them all? They should germinate in 7-14 days so we’ll let you know.
Are you growing sunflowers too? If you’re blogging about them, please link up with the Linky below so we can all come and see how you’re getting on. And help yourself to the Sunflower Club button (on the left-hand column) to add to your blog page. If you haven’t got a blog we’d love you to leave a comment here or on the facebook page.
Happy planting!
