The BUZZ: The Great Sunflower Project Moves into 2012!
We are excited to begin a new year. We look forward to new seeds to plant, new gardens in the works, new observations and new insights. 2012 marks the fourth year for the Great Sunflower Project, and we are looking forward to having YOU be a part of it.
We would like to extend our deepest thanks to those of you who observed last year and sent in your data – you continue to make our project a success. And those who haven’t sent in your data or just joined up are encouraged to start planning now for a new year.
This year, we are introducing another way for you to join with us to help: If you are a garden educator, a community organizer, a garden club member, activity leader, work with groups, or are just plain interested in helping the Great Sunflower Project in a bigger way, we invite you to join The Garden Leader Project .
Here’s how it works: You sign up to be a Garden Leader, and agree to plant Lemon Queen Sunflowers in at least 3 locations which you register on the site. You will be responsible for the care of the sunflowers until they are blooming and ready for bees. Then you will organize at least 3 other people or groups to do at least one bee visit count at each location. Send in data from your locations. Win prizes! Here’s what you get:
- All Garden Leaders who sign up before April 2 will receive FREE SEEDS. That’s right, free Lemon Queen Sunflower seeds, but only to those who register.
- PRIZES. We are awarding one cash prize of $500 to your group and dozens of other prizes from gardening equipment to textbooks, to calendars and note cards.
- SATISFACTION in knowing that you helped pollinator conservation in your area.
Stay tuned for more details, and watch our web site for sign-up forms and a list of prizes. If you have questions, send them to "savebees@gmail.com" (not by replying to this email).
We’re excited about 2012 and are looking forward to a year full of learning, observation and fun!
All the best,
Freddy B
Comments
lots of bumblebees!
The Lemon Queen sunflowers are not blooming yet, but we have Phacelia tanacetifolia, California poppies, and catmint blooming. I have not seen so many different varieties of bumblebee ever! I can't definitively identify them, but last year I saw ONE type of bumblebee; so far I have see at least 6, and that doesn't count the ones that look alike but are probably separate species, plus the honeybees, and various flower flies and small sweat bees. The phacelia is about done blooming; (due to a warm winter it never died back, so these are plants that germinated last fall and grew all winter). I'm scrambling to plant more, plus agastache, which I know the bumbles love. So far it's a banner year for bumblebees here in Portland, Oregon--hooray!
Hi Patti, I understand how
Hi Patti,
I understand how exciting it is to be able to observe and identify more and more types of bees. I'm always impressed by how beautiful and abundant they are around Portland.
If you havent seen it yet, check out the Xerces Society guide to Pacific Northwest Bee Resources: http://www.xerces.org/pollinators-pacific-northwest-region/
it's pretty comprehensive. Good luck and happy gardening!
Freddy B
2012
Glad to know you guys still send out seeds. I have been planting Sunflower with your seeds since 2009. But last year i forgot to save some seeds for this year : (
Joined the Garden Leader Program, looking forward for this years sunflower : )
Being Garden Leaders / Request for data feedback
Dear Freddy,
Our Master Gardener group of some 200 avid gardeners formally joined the Great Sunflower Project last March. We submitted data sets from the Mercer Educational Garden located at 431A Federal City Road in Pennington,NJ (zipcode 08534). We would like to continue our involvement with the project and five of us have agreed to be garden leaders in the new project. We would like to apply for five free seed packets.
We have two concerns. One concern is that there are no data points for anywhere in New Jersey on the data map available on the Your Garden Show .com Website. Will the project be posting a more up-to-date version of the map? We hope our data submissions were included somewhere.
Our other query is that the Lemon Queen Sunflower seeds we purchased last year from Burpee's (and also from High Mowing Seed company) grew closer to ten feet tall than to the 5-6 feet height listed on the package. The plant height created some measurement challenges for us in our display garden. Have others shared this height issue? Will Renee's seeds also grow that tall ?
Hoping to hear from you,
Gayle Henkin
sign up to be a Garden Leader
I'd like to sign up for this. I'm a Webelos den leader and this would be a great project for my scouts. What do I need to do to register?
watch this space.. we are
watch this space.. we are currently re vamping the website to include a Garden Leader Page. We have a list of all those who have expressed an interest this year, and we will be sending out email instructions, as well.
This is a perfect project for scouts! Stay tuned!
F