Sunflowers

The sunflower is a large inflorescence, this means the flower head is actually made of many tiny flowers called florets. Central florets look like the centre of a normal flower while the outer florets look like yellow petals and together they make up a "false flower". This natural design helps insects and birds to easily see the sunflower and after pollination every little flower or floret produces a seed.

This year we have challenged all our Forest Schoolers to grow a giant sunflower. That means by the end of the year we should have somewhere in the region of 400 growing on site. Hopefully this will lead to a mini sunflower meadow on site but we will have to see how thing go.

The first step of course is planting the seed. We have chosen the variety Russian Giant and hope to see them achieve somewhere near to their 3 metres in height.

By early April every child had planted their seed and we were beginning to find out how many had not germinated. As children came out to check on them another seed was quickly planted.

Then came the warm weather. After the cool wet lead up to Easter we were glad of our SolarDome for getting things started but the heat when the Spring sunshine gets going is just too much for the young plants and the quickly had to be moved outside.

This led to another problem only seen minimally inside, the full scale massacre of a slug attack.

Nearly a whole group lost their sunflowers and others well on their way to 50cm were scythed down.

The children's solution was to raise the pallets they were standing on off the ground but many more will need to be planted to replace those lost.

More news to follow .......