So often pictures posted at busy times never see the screen but go directly to the data base. Here are some I took this morning that are so bright and cheery that I would like to share......and a Zinnia.















The Zinnia

LOVE the colors! I,for one, am SO glad you shared! Beautiful!

Thanks....

Love them!

makes me wanna get some sunflower seeds...love the color of these

me, too, thanks paul!

Beautiful Paul!!!

I love sunflowers and planted them for the last 5 years but last year the deer ate them so I did not put any out. One year I did the really giant ones and love watching the squirrels climb them and eat the seeds!

Thanks everyone

to all the above comments. Nice shots!

Beautiful Sunflowers. My early season sunflowers are done blooming but the second planting I did of sunflowers are blooming now. Mine are just common yellow ones. But I like them anyway.

I see more of the common sunflowers growing in well kept gardens the last few years. I think they are gaining in appreciation.

Well, I start seeds and then plant them out as seedlings so I defianatly wanted them there. Many years I plant fancy varieties and shades of reds and oranges. But this year I only had the seeds for common yellow ones so that is what I planted. They are still pretty enough in my opinion.

Sometime in the 1960's I went to a big nursery in Salt Lake city. They had Rudbeckias which at that time were called gloriosa daisies and I bought several plants for my father ...he loved flowers. When I got them home he was not enthused with them...he thought they looked to much like sun flowers which to him were weeds.. He grew to love them and i still have descendants growing in my yard 50+ years later.

http://www.greatsunflower.org/ This is a website with the idea is to plant one specific cultivar of sunflower then go out and count how many bees visit your flowers in a 15 minute period and log that onto the web site. This was started back when the bee collapse was happening. I did it a couple years, but then had trouble getting seed of the cultivar they were tracking and kind of lost track of it. Something to think about for next season perhaps.

Isn't it hard to keep count of the number of bees or are you talking just one or two sunflowers? I guess I was picturing a row of them!

As I recall, you focus on one flower for X minutes and count the number of bee hits on that particular bloom. Rather similar to the internet bird reporting - not a controlled scientific study but certainly useful information on where/when the bees are pollinating. I didn't do it this year so I'm a bit hazy on the details.

Aha, that makes sense. Would be interesting to observe.

The years I did do the counting, it became part of my morning coffee ritual.

What a nice morning coffee rituàl!