Sunflowers

After the chipmunks moved in, the sunflowers bloomed.  I’ve planted sunflowers before and gotten a few short wimpy individuals.  Now and then I would get a tall plant that would blow over in our summer winds.  Being unsuccessful in growing them, we bought bags of sunflower seeds and thistle seeds to feed the birds.  We had the pleasure of admiring the yellow flashes of the goldfinches and other seed lovers.  We even had downy woodpeckers taking sunflower seeds out of the feeder, placing them in a crack in a fencepost, then pounding them open to get to the rich seed.  Avian tool users.

Then chipmunks moved into holes under our backyard pine tree roots.  We watched their staccato movements as they explored, carefully approaching the seeds.  At first, they picked up the seeds the birds would drop.  Later we would lay out extra loose seeds on a stump for them to find.  They filled their cheek pouches to bulging, and then hid the seeds for later.  It turned out that they stashed and buried many of the seeds in the vegetable garden.

I’ve never been one to keep a neat and clean garden, and I let the volunteer chipmunk-planted sunflowers grow where they chose.  We had a park of sunflowers here and there, and they grew tall.  Some had large foot-wide single sunflowers.  Other plants had multiple smaller hand-sized flowers.  We watched as the yellow flowers followed the sun each day, turning from east to west. We watched bees and butterflies pollinate the flowers.   As the seeds started to mature, we watched chipmunks climb up the tall stems to nibble on their personally planted sunflowers, as if they were farmers testing their crop.  Goldfinches and other birds joined the all-you-can eat buffet.

We didn’t harvest the crop; we left them for the birds to forage on through the fall and winter.  The sunflowers come back thick, year after year.  This summer we have a jungle of sunflowers in a large patch.  Bright yellow petals color my pleasantly messy garden.  The sun worshipping flowers first give shade to the birds on our long hot days, later they feed the insects, birds, and chipmunks.   The feeding animals drop seeds on the ground, planting next year’s crop.  If I’m not careful they will soon outcompete the vegetables.  I may let them.