Believe it or not, these sunflower seeds went thru the washer and dryer! Who will win – the dryer vs. the sunflower seeds?
It dawned on me in the early spring of the 2021 Empty Nest Garden. There’s no need to use a perfectly good hügelkultur bed for sunflowers when we have all this space. And sunflowers aren’t super picky about their soil anyway. So building the sunflower bed, even a tiny 25×100’ out of this raw land, was hard won between the weeds, invasives, and hard-packed soil.
The dryer vs. sunflower seeds
After a tired, dirty, and sweaty couple of hours of finally finishing preparing the sunflower bed and planting sunflowers, I came in from the garden feeling exhausted and defeated. I was actually victorious, just exhausted. Soil that had been solarized, tilled, raked, and rocks picked out had just been raked smooth and planted with 500 sunflower seeds. I won.
Making my way into the house and didn’t think; I just needed a shower. I peeled off my clothes straight into the washer and jumped in the shower. When I got around to pulling my clean clothes out of the dryer, some seeds were in the bottom, and more were in the dryer lint trap. What the heck?
The missing seed packet
Oooooh that’s where the rest of the packet went! It was in my pocket, and made a trip through the washer and the dryer. I wonder, will they sprout? It would be a cool experiment. So I took a handful of seeds I scavenged from the dryer and put them in a wet paper towel. And look at how well they sprouted!
I planted twelve of my dryer seed sprouts into 4” pots for a couple of weeks. Then, after two weeks, I gingerly dumped them out of their pots into my hand, pulled some loose soil back, and plopped them in. I grew them into a bare spot in one of my garden beds where I could watch them, and they wouldn’t get mixed up with the other sunflowers. They grew beautifully, just as you’d expect.
~ Lola
“There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments!”
Why I Garden; if you grow it, they will eat it
Gardens we’ve built
Community Oasis Garden; exploring the passion
The Gardening Passion Expands; the garden that created a bidding war
Quick Turn Garden; two years and counting
The Empty Nest Garden; totally out of control
Coops we’ve built
How NOT to Build a Chicken Coop
The Bored Engineer’s Coop
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