Khongelani

Jeannie Moragne Jnr

Featured Plant Trivia of the Day

SUNFLOWER

Sunflowers, in all their colorful glory, are a happy sight to behold—but there's more to their nature than just beauty. The multipurpose plants deliver healthy snacks, useful oil, and birdseeds. Let your garden knowledge flourish with these facts about Helianthus Annuus.

🌻The flowers not only look like the sun, they need a lot of it. They grow best with about six to eight hours a day but more is even better. They can grow as tall as 16 feet, although many varieties have been developed to thrive at different heights. Flowers planted too close together will compete and not blossom to their full potential.

🌻Sunflowers track the sun or display a behavior called heliotropism. The flower buds and young blossoms will face east in the morning and follow the sun as the earth moves during the day. However, as the flowers get heavier during seed production, the stems will stiffen and the mature flower heads will generally remain facing east.

🌻The world's tallest sunflower reaches 30 feet and 1 inch. In the summer of 2014, Veteran green-thumb Hans-Peter Schiffer toppled the Guinness World Record for third year in a row. The local fire brigade lent its help in measuring the sunflower, which required its own scaffold.

🌻Sunflowers have traveled to outer space. In 2012, U.S. astronaut Don Pettit brought along a few companions to the International Space Station: sunflower seeds. Petit regularly blogged about his budding friendship and shared photos of the gardening process.

🌻Sunflower has actually consists of thousand tiny flowers called florets. Each head is made of smaller flowers. The petals we see around the outside are called ray florets, and they cannot reproduce. But the disc florets in the middle, where the seeds develop, have both male and female s*x organs, and each produce a seed. They can self-pollinate or take pollen blown by the wind or transported by insects.

🌻If you want to grow sunflowers in your garden, there's a lot of varieties to get started. They are easy to germinate and need not much attention while growing. For the whole list of sunflowers, go to this link:

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