Sustainable Saturday -Godzilla Sunflowers

Have you ever seen a community garden? If you are traveling north on I-81 near exit 5, you will see our garden.  Be sure to wave "hi". (How will you find our plot?  Look for the Godzilla Sunflowers.  More on that later.)

I've been blogging this week about the community garden my spouse (he does almost all of the work especially in the past few years that I've had back problems) rents plots in.  It is located in a county park here in upstate New York called Otsiningo Park.  It parallels I-81 and our gardening efforts are accompanied by the sound of highway traffic.

This garden allows people living in apartments and rental houses and people whose home yards are too small or too shady to grow their own food.

Here are some photos taken today in the community garden.  These are mainly not of our plot as I wanted to give a shoutout to all of our hard working gardening friends.

Some of us have traditional gardens of tomatoes, squash, and corn.

Some of us garden very neatly. (I can assure you, this ISN'T our plot.)

This plot (also see picture above) belongs to an immigrant from Asia.  He has gardened for a number of years next to us.  He's been generous enough to give us some of his transplants - I suspect he starts many of his plants himself.

And then, there is my spouse and I.   This year our main crop is Godzilla Sunflowers.

Our plot seems to have transformed itself into a sunflower paradise.  Many of our plants are volunteer seedlings.  If we sold these flowers, we could probably make back the cost of our garden!  But we don't.  The birds enjoy a lot of the seeds and we cut the flowers for our table.  Only drawback, these flowers shed pollen, and lots of it.

We've had a lot of animal problems. I don't know why the animals have been making beelines to our plot, but we will have no beans this year, and are only now getting squash.  But, our peppers are fine, we had a great onion crop and our tomatoes are ripening nicely.

Our drought is breaking. We are very lucky, compared to a lot of the United States.  My heart goes out to those still suffering from drought.

I will leave you with one last picture  I should have had my spouse stand next to this Godzilla Sunflower for scale. But I can assure you, this one is over 7 feet tall.

If it is gardening season where you live, what's growing well for you?