The Great Sunflower Project

Dear Sunflower Participants,

If you haven’t gotten a late September sample in, now would be a good time!

Next year's plans. It’s amazing to realize that we are arriving at the end of the sunflower season. I just checked and we have almost 40,000 people already signed up for next year. I am working on raising money and have every expectation that we will continue this project. It costs about a dollar per participant to do mailings and we’re hoping to get some resources to expand our website and outreach next year. I have been in touch with two new potential seed suppliers up and we have arranged to get the first wave of sunflower seeds mailed in April. This winter, I’ll email everyone with updates highlighting what we have learned this year and ask you to update your address. Please spread the word, wouldn’t it be exciting to have 100,000 participants?!

Sunflower head mailings. If you are going to mail us a sunflower head, you don’t need to wrap it in any type of bag or plastic. An envelope will suffice. We need to dry them out to count. We had a hot week here in San Francisco and several of the sunflower heads that arrived in plastic were a bit moldy. They are still usable, but rather ripe!

Contacting us. . Many of you have gotten emails from Shannon or Fern who have been responding to many of the questions that you have sent to sfbee@sfsu.edu. They have been a wonderful help. Fern is a senior , majoring in biology and Shannon is graduating in December and plans to become an elementary school teacher. They have had a hard time keeping up with the flow of emails and currently are running several weeks behind in responding. They will be working through mid-October and try to catch up. After that, I will be our only staff member. You can send me emails at lebuhn@sfsu.edu or better yet, use our forums. I get a real sense of community by seeing how people help each other on the forums. I’ve learned quite a few tricks for gardening also. You can find the forums at http://www.greatsunflower.org/en/forum. I wear many hats in addition to running the Sunflower Project, including parenting three year old twins, I’ll do my best to keep up .

New Forum. . We have added a new forum – Suggestions for 2009. We would love to hear from you how to improve the project, anything from suggestions on seed suppliers to where you found the website confusing or how to expand the number of participants. I’m hoping our key issues from 2008, seed germination and getting seeds out quickly, are now under control. We’d also like to be more responsive to emails and, if I can get enough funding, I’ll double the number of people helping keep track of those.

As always, thank you, thank you, thank you. You have all inspired us.

Gretchen LeBuhn
Queen Bee
The Great Sunflower Project