Sunflowers At The Summer Solstice

The longest day of the year was this past Monday. Sure, it’s the first day of summer, but the summer solstice also signals that the days hence begin to get shorter, shrinking a bit each day and making fall seem like it gets here all the more faster.

As you may know I’ve had a cam set up and both webcasting and archiving images snapped every 10 minutes of the sunflowers we planted in Coyote Corner on June 7 and now have growing. As of this morning a righteous 85 seeds of the 100 planted have sprouted.

I’m pleasantly surprised by such a high-percentage of plants because Coyote Corner is not an entirely ideal place for a sunflower seedling to be. The plot only scores a few hours of direct sunlight each day and that’s somewhat filtered by the neighboring trees that shade the plot.

But anyway, from the accumulated images I’ve excerpted the sunflowers’ full day on June 21, literally via a snap about every 30 minutes from dawn to dark. I would suggest slowing the sequence down by advancing the frames with your arrow key (if that functionality’s available via your computer). It’s fun to see how much the sunflowers move over the course of a day.