The Great Sunflower Project

I just received my free sunflower seeds from The Great Sunflower Project this past week. (See my 2/16/09 post describing this project)

I have raised garden beds for my vegetables but this year I'm cutting way back on the vegetables. I've purchased a produce subscription through Arctic Organics based in Palmer. For one fee, you receive a variety of organic, locally grown, vegetables every week! And the best part is that their delivery area is only a couple of blocks from my house so every Wednesday Will & I can go for a walk & pick up our vegetables.

Arctic Organics provides new & unusual vegetables & with every delivery you also receive a newsletter identifying the contents & recipes to give you ideas for meal preparation. I love this! It's the main reason I wanted to grow less vegetables & more sunflowers this year ~ I'm in a rut with my garden....little gardening joke there!

Anyway, back to the Sunflower Project. I thought I would plant one large raised vegetable bed all in sunflowers. The sunflowers for the project have to be Lemon Queen so I'm going to plant most of the bed in that variety but also include some miniature & ornamental sunflowers. It should look striking & hopefully the bees will appreciate the pollen.

The bees....yes, that's the point of The Great Sunflower Project. It's basically a research project to collect data on when, where & how long you see bees visiting the sunflowers. Seeing no bees is important too. I don't think that will happen since I have two bee hives in my yard & they love my garden & fruit bushes/trees.

I'm hoping to have a set time every day or week when Will & I do our bee counting in the garden. Hopefully we'll be able to get some good photos too. Maybe have a cup of tea, a couple of cookies, & count bees...all in the name of science!