Experimenting with sunflowers

 Yesterday I went to my son's classroom to help out with a science experiment.  I got a pound each of Red Wigglers and European Earthworms and four different types of sunflowers.  We divided up their garden plot and planted the sunflowers in each side of the plot.  Then we placed the worms on either side and the kids timed how long it took for their worm to dig itself into the ground.  It was 'boys vs girls' and the kids went back and calculated the average time for the different times for the worms to make it into the ground.  The will watch the garden grow and see if the worms have any affect on the grown of the flowers.  The teacher wanted something easy to grow and something that the birds could enjoy over the summer.  These should be ready to harvest next year when the kids come back to school and most of the kids live close to the school so they can come by during the summer and enjoy the flowers.  At first some of the kids weren't too sure about touching the worms, but after seeing that they wouldn't get bitten by the worms, they were all holding out their hands and enjoyed getting a whole hand full of the worms.  I believe in overdoing things and every kid had a great big hand full of worms to play with!  They all had a great time!

Then we came home and planted one packet of sunflower seeds in our little garden out back.  We planted the SkyScraper sunflowers in here.  They are supposed to be really tall and big.  I can't find the place I ordered them from, but I'm pretty sure it was ebay.  I thought I read they were supposed to be 50 feet tall (but then I never was very good at math :)

I hope the snails don't get them all.  We will have our own little experiment out here in the backyard and hopefully have something growing out here this summer.  We are having such a terrible drought that we aren't supposed to water anything so I hope I can keep them alive.  Maybe I will have to start saving the water from our showers to bring outside.  Wouldn't that be funny?