Things on sunflowers

That's right. Things on sunflowers.

I like sunflowers.

I like things.

It's all good.

Ok, seriously? I do like sunflowers. It's funny because normally I'm not much of a fan of yellow, but there's something about sunflowers and the time of year that they're in bloom that makes me happy. It doesn't hurt, of course, that there are some really neat patterns to be found in sunflower buds and sunflower heads.

Every OLF needs a good pattern now and then, you know.

Anyway, my father knows that I like sunflowers, and because of that he's kind enough to allow a fair amount of volunteer sunflowers to come up in the garden every year.

Volunteer, yes.

You see, one of the nice things about sunflowers is that if you grow them one year and then don't pull them down when they've died off (say, because you know how much the chickadees like scavenging seeds from the heads on the standing stalks), you know for sure that you'll get to have sunflowers the next year.

Probably more than you want, the way the birds scatter the seeds, but they'll be there. And hey -- the seedlings are big enough to spot and easy enough to pull if they come up in a place that you really don't want them to.

But why wouldn't you want them to? They're sunflowers. They're great.

So here we are then. It's sunflower season, so you'll likely be seeing plenty of them in the pointless photography. I'm allowed. My house, my rules. Today's offering is of a couple of things that I found on the sunflowers yesterday.

Up top, an annoyingly shy bee on one of the slightly rusty sunflowers that we've been getting for years. I think they probably started off as a reddish variety, but since they've been interbreeding with the sunflowers that grow from the seed spilled from the bird feeder they've been getting yellow tips. I think it's kind of neat, personally.

In the middle, my hand aiming a flower head at the camera. If you look closely you'll notice a little white spider in the centre (a spider on this blog? Never!). It's a crab spider of some sort. Probably a Goldenrod spider (you've seen them here before), but since I don't see the usual stripes on the abdomen I don't want to say for sure. The bottom photo is a closer look at the spider. It wasn't too happy about my visiting its hunting grounds so it was moving around a lot, but you get the idea.

Well, that's it for things on sunflowers for today. Tune in tomorrow when we'll be featuring... I dunno. Maybe things on plants that aren't sunflowers. I have a few photos here and there that would fit the bill.





Yeah, yeah. I know that everyone's terribly surprised to hear that.