Live Gardening Show with Lisa Z!

Did you know that you can keep planting sunflowers until 60 days before your first fall frost? It’s called “succession planting”, and it’s great for gardeners and farmers alike! Come learn how Lisa succession plants her sunflowers at The Gardener’s Workshop farm, plus her favorite tools, seeds, and supplies for the job!

Hey flower friends, it is your friend in sunflowers this week, Lisa Mason Ziggler, and I’m so glad you’re here for the live gardening show brought to you by the gardenersworkshop.com. Friends, today I’m going to be sharing some of my tips and tricks to growing amazing sunflowers, which were huge cash crops for my flower farm um for decades. And it’s not always what you think. So, I’m going to give you some tips that I bet a couple you didn’t even know about. So, stick with me here. And how about this? I mean, I can remember thinking back when I first started growing sunflowers um decades ago, thinking, when are they going to they’re so once you figure it out, they’re so easy and they’re so sellable. When are they going to go out of style? When am I going to have to find something new? friends, here we are three decades later and we still have high demand for sunflower seeds, for sunflower flowers and you know so you have to make the most of that. So let me put these babies down and let’s get started here. So whether you are a home gardener or a flower farmer um everybody loves sunflowers and um one of the things that I missed out on the first years as a flower farmer for me is I would on occasion plant sunflowers and have them at the farmers market and every time I did people like oh my gosh we love sunflowers. They’d buy some. Then the next week I’d come back and I didn’t have sunflowers that week and they’d say oh no sunflowers this week. would they go on a, you know, a little trip around the market trying to find somebody had sunflowers. It still didn’t sink into me just how as a business person this could be so beneficial to me. And so I’m going to share with you how I perfected that consistent constant supply of sunflowers. And if you’re a home gardener, how you can do the very same thing for your garden but just on a much smaller scale. So, I am going to show you some different ways to start sunflower seeds. Um, and we’re going to talk about um then some of the different sunflowers and how you know what meets the eye is not always the whole story, right? Um, and how you can figure out how early and how late you can actually start sunflowers. So my goal has been for the last 20 years of flower farming is to have sunflowers as early as possible and as late as possible. Now we uh most commercial growers start all their seeds that they can indoors because it’s just basically less work, right? Um and so we start them and I’m going to show you the way that we do it. Um, we start them indoors to with the plan of growing them in a tray for two and a half to three weeks and they’re planted out at the most three weeks old. This makes for the highest level of success, the least amount of intervention and work. Um, and so I grow a group of sunflowers or a series called Prout series. And that picture that you see over my shoulder there with all those beautiful flowers, y’all, those are all sunflowers. Those are all pro cut sunflowers in all the different colors that they they offer from the whites to the by colors to the dark we call them chocolates but they’re actually called red. Um to the oranges and it’s just a great family and other things that we love about them. Um they are quick from seed to bloom. They’re about 55 to 60 days. Um, and that makes them really fast cuz you know there are sunflowers if you start reading on sun packets how many days from seed to bloom. There are some sunflowers that need 120 days. So, you really have to kind you can’t just grab a sunflower and do what I’m talking about today. You have to have a sunflower that is fairly quick. And that’s one of the reasons we love Pro Cuts. As well as most of the Pro Cuts have really stiff necks. We absolutely love that about them. They’re pollenless. They still produce nectar, y’all. We’re not growing these for pollinators. However, the pollinators visit them for the nectar. We’re growing them as cut flowers. And flowers that produce pollen have a shorter vase life and they drop pollen all over people’s homes. Um, and that’s just really an issue. So, the Pro Cut series has all of those things. Um, and so how do you figure out when you can start and when you have to stop? Well, it’s really simple. You can start 3 weeks before your last spring frost because you know that 3 weeks old is when you should plant them. And you’re going to plant them out in spring, right? And how long can you plant them? Well, because I plant pro cuts, which are we’re just going to say 60 days. 60 days from seed to bloom. My first historic frost date is mid- November. So two months is what 60 days is, right? So, November to October to midepptember. So, technically midepptember is when I can plant up till. Well, I actually push the envelope and gamble that maybe my frost won’t come and actually go two weeks past that because it’s worth it. It’s just sunflower seeds that I would lose. But what a win if I could have sunflowers to sell the week of Thanksgiving or the week before, right? So, that’s how you figure out. So, I start them from that 3 weeks before frost right up until about 45 days before my la my first fall frost every single week. And that’s how you have sunflowers to harvest for to support your bouquet program um you know for your florist for whatever. And if you’re a home gardener, here’s a great tip. So, if you just want to grow sunflowers because you love the way they I mean, who doesn’t want that, right? Out in their garden, um, and you like to leave them out in the garden for the birds. And by the way, many of the colors in the Pro Cut series are black oil sunflower seeds. So, if you leave the heads out in your garden, they develop that. And the song birds, oh my goodness, the chickies and the tit mouse, all of them, the cardinals, they all come and just absolutely love it. But if I was a home gardener and I wanted to have sunflowers all throughout the season, I would be starting a few and I’m going to show you different ways to start just a few at a time each week. So, let’s just say you have a long bed and I’m your house and this long bed is out in your yard and you’re going to be looking at it like this. I would start is let’s just say you’re going to start eight sunflowers a week for your home garden, right? And so from the furthest away from my view, I’m going to put my eight sunflowers in a row. Then next week, I’m going to put the next eight in front of them. And the next week, the next eight in front of them. You know what that does? That makes um the sunflowers that are blooming and beautiful, the front ones, and then as they start to age out and heads go down and they develop seed, guess what? The ones in front of them will bloom. And so that’s just a little tip on how you can have ongoing sunflowers out in your garden all till pretty much right up until frost. So we plant them every single week so that we have them to show to you guys. But back when we were in um flower farming business selling tons of flowers, we planted 1,200 a week because it supported our bouquet subscriptions, our membersonly market, all those wonderful things. So, the first thing I want to show you are some different ways to actually start sunflowers. Then I’m going to show you some sunflowers after we wrap up this whole how do you start them. So, one of the great options um and you’ll find all of these products that I’m going to mention here in a ribbon below the video. And if you’re watching on a phone, you may have to close the chat box to actually be able to view them, but you can check it all out. And oh, I forgot to tell y’all. It is Christmas in July at the Gardener Workshop. We are doing 20% off all this week up until July 7th on most everything. There’s just a couple exclusions, um, gift certificates, previous purchases, and our club membership. So, use the promotion code. You’ll never forget Santa, y’all. So, 20% off of everything pretty much. So, this is one of the ways that it’s super easy for home gardeners to start big seeds. So, this is our pot and tray set. Friends, these are made in the USA and they are so durable. They last forever. I mean, they’re molded plastic. They’re not like the flimsy black plug trays, which are not meant to last more than a couple of seasons. These are awesome. So, the set comes with two bottom trays, which by the way have no drainage holes. So, that means that you can do this anywhere in your home and not worry about water running out. You would just dump off any excess if you overwatered. So, it comes with two separate trays. And a tray holds four of these cell packs. And these are really a perfect size to start sunflower seeds in. See there? You could start 16 sunflowers. Really easy. Each of these cups holds about a cup of um soil. And what would we use? We like to use just any good quality potting soil mix 50/50 with some finished compost. I just buy a bag of each and just mix those together and that just makes for a great mix. So the pot and tray set is there to start, you know, we would use that when you don’t want I mean you could start four sunflowers or you could start eight sunflowers or it’s really up to you, right? So you could kind of figure it out. Um and so that’s the pot and tray set and that’s a really great thing. Um buying longlasting tools when they’re on sale is just the best part, right? Because you haven’t got to replace them all the time. Now the other way um if I was a flower farmer I’ll show you how we started them for all these years right? So we used actual plug trays. So this is a plug tray and this is called a 128 plug tray. That means there’s 128 holes. So these sunflowers were just started. I just took these off the heat. They’re still emerging. Um and why do we do this? Because sunflowers are a little bit bigger seed, we can’t sew them into the small soil block, which is what I use most of the time to start all my seeds. I’d have to use the larger soil block, which I’m going to show you in a moment. But to start the volume that we need, we don’t want to make hundreds of soil blocks each week of the large blocker, we just use a plug tray. Now, this is what they look like. This is our fivepack of the plug trays. And 128 means that there’s 128 holes or plants potentially that are in there. And I’m going to show you in a moment um a seed collection for succession planting sunflowers that that succession planting kit or collection. And these um um plug trays actually could put you in business for your sunflowers because sunflowers only grow in this tray until they’re at the most 3 weeks old. So you just keep rotating and using these over and over again. And so you’ll find these down below in the ribbon. And remember friends, use the Santa promotion and that gives you 20% off. You know, purchasing supplies that you use all the time is a great time to I mean, we just love offering a discount um to actually be able to use these kinds of things. So this is the standard 128 plug tray. Now, um, so let me just give you the rest of the rundown on this. We start them, we plant them, we put them onto a ceiling heat mat to get the roots growing instantly and have them sprouting. I then move them out onto my carport or actually the open porch to be in full blast in sun. And if you need to, you need to protect them from birds and bunnies. Um, and they grow in that plug until they’re about two and a half to three weeks old. As soon as we pull the neck and the whole cell comes out, that’s when we know that um they are ready to be planted out into the garden. So, let’s look at another way that um if you’re a home gardener that this is if I was a home gardener would be a great way to actually start these blocks. This is the 2-in soil blocker, which we don’t use the 2-in nearly as much as we use the small blocker, but when you need it, like for times like now, it is does a super great job. So, this is the Ladbrook original made in England blocker. And this is the blocking mix which um we always offer the DIY make it your own blocking mix at home as well as you’ll find the blocking mix available on our website. This is a potato masher, y’all. That’s what I use to mix the soil with the water. And oh, let me push you up just a little bit. I don’t think you’ll be able to see when I go to make these. So, we use reusable foam trays. I like to use, and you can see this has been used plenty of times, um, you want to fit the number of blocks that you’re going to start to the size tray you use. That helps you to maximize your um, heat mat and growite space. So, literally, the way I make this is you just that quick, my friends, make the little 2-in soil blocks, which is the container, and then we plant one seed down in the little divot. See, it comes with that little white nipple on there that makes an indention. And then I would sew my sunflower seeds. And I do the same thing I do for the plug tray. They go over to seed um onto a seedling heat mat to warm the soil to get them to sprout as quickly as possible. And let’s just look at a sunflower seed. So this is um one of the pro cut mixes. And as I mentioned before, the Pro Cuts, many of most of the colors are black oil sunflower seeds. So, you can see that they’re just too large to go into the small block. So, they do really, really well in the 2-in block. So that is how we would, you know, and that’s just a great option, right, for the home gardener to be able to start four a week, eight a week, 12 a week, 16, whatever your pleasure is. And they don’t take up much space and you can just have sunflowers all summer long right in your own garden. Um, so let’s take a look before we start looking at flowers. Um, and in that ribbon down below, another product, um, that is one of our top selling things, believe it or not, are these reusable foam trays. This is the one that I just used that holds eight of those, um, 2-in blocks. And we have different sizes. It just really depends on what you’re actually doing. And again, we use masking tape with our garden marker, and that just allows us to mark what variety and what week they’re in, so we know exactly when to um plant them. So, let’s look at some of the um choices that you have. So, I mentioned that we are Pro Cut Grow. I love the Pro Cut family. Um they have just proven to be pretty fantastic to us. Um and so you know that picture which is that’s off the cover of my book um the cut flower handbook. Um that was such a fun day when we made that. Um but here is the seed um the seed packets. This is called the pro cut mix and we make this mix inhouse. Um and that way there is even numbers of all there’s 12 or 14 I never can remember. Um different shades by colors. Look I love this one. This is gold light, the green center with gold petals. Then there’s the white light and the lemon. I mean, tone y’all, if you’ve never grown pro cuts, this is where I suggest you start so you can meet all the colors. And it comes in a 50 pack or a 200 pack. And again, remember, use Santa as your promotion code when you’re checking out. Um, and you will get 20% off. So, this is a great way. And so, how do you know when to stop planting, friends? You have to know your first fall frost, right? Your first historic expected fall frost. Learn that on a search engine, put your zip code in and ask it that. And then up to 60 days before that date, you can keep planting the Pro Cut family. And so, here’s another one that I absolutely love. This is the bouquet mix. So, this looks like just orange sunflowers. Well, it is orange sunflowers, but there’s four different ones in here. And as you’re going to see here shortly, um, all orange sunflowers are not exactly the same. There’s more under behind them than what we actually think. So, this mix, which we also make inhouse, um, includes four of the different oranges. They have different hues. One of them aims their bloom differently. When we grow this out in the garden, literally we can harvest and make bunches of just sunflowers. While they’re all orange, they do look a little bit different because they have the different hues of orange. So, totally love that one. And the best part of it is I’m missing one. Here it is. Um, what I love about that is that you don’t have to buy four separate packs, right? You can get all four of those different ones in one pack. And here’s another custom mix that we made. This is called the fall medally. And look at these. It’s got five different sunflowers. That’s the orange. There’s we call it chocolate, but it’s red. That’s the by color. This is plum. And this is I think they call it the lemon red by color. I love this one. Um I mean this is made for fall. So, if I was a flower farmer, I’d be sitting down and saying, “All right, I my market goes through the end of October and my frost dates when Lisa’s is mid November. You better believe I’m going to have massive sunflowers each week of October and September.” I mean, y’all, this is where I you can make or break your season. So, that is the fall medley. And once again, don’t forget to use the Santa promotion code to get 20% off because we’re having Christmas in July. And y’all, you know, when we’re out harvesting in 95 degree weather, Bobo and I, we talk about two different things. Sometimes we talk about Christmas, cold stuff, you know, Christmas trees, icicles dripping. I mean, we talk of these because we’re cooking alive out in the garden. The other thing we dream of and talk about is the Hubba Bubba Highway, which is a ride, and that name is not right. That’s a ride at Water Country. I live right next to Williamsburg, Virginia. Um that’s like a narrow pool that has jets that people ride um tubes um inner tubes in and it goes all the way. I mean, it’s like a mile long. And Bobo and I dream of having one of those around my flower farm. And that’s what we talk about. So anyway, I just thought I’d share that with you. Um, so I mentioned earlier with that fivep pack of the plug trays, this and this is a great deal for your 20% off. This is for flower farmers or avid gardeners. This sunflower succession collection, each one of these packages has 200 seeds in it. So you get 1,200 seeds, right? And so if you started a plug ch tray a week, um you could start each one of these a week and still have seeds left over and have trays left over to start all over again. And then you just rotate through the trays again. Um so this is a really great one. This has one of my favorite sunflowers. Notice how that bloom, all these blooms are facing you. Look where that one’s facing. You know that’s perfect for making bouques, y’all. to go right on the top that flower that you need. That is just perfect. Um, but this is really a lot of fun. And then there’s some additional instructions in here. Um, and it tells you really it tells you everything in here. I had never opened that and looked. What a great idea. So, this is the sunflower succession kit. Now, if you’re the home gardener and whether you want to cut them or grow them for the birds, song birds love sunflowers, right? Woodpeckers. We have so many woodpeckers here on this farm. This little sunflower garden collection comes. It’s 3 by 10 feet is what is suggested. There’s more than enough seeds. Look at this. It’s got the suggested diagram on how to plant them. Um, and one of these sunflowers is actually a branching sunflower, which is really fun. Not the greatest for a cut flower, but in a garden it is absolutely perfect. Um, and so again, it’s 20% off when you use Santa. And this just has a nice mix. Look at those different sunflowers. You can enjoy them, cut some, leave some, and then let the seed heads develop. Um, they This is really a fun garden to grow with your kids or your grandkids. Um, first off, watching them grow. And I was going to look, the instructions in here tell you how to plant the seeds directly in the garden, but here’s what I want to tell you about that. You can definitely do that, but it just takes a daily visit to water them, protect them from birds eating the seeds, as well as keeping the weeds under control. It’s just less work to start indoors. Um, so you can start them outside and it’s definitely hot enough now where we are anyway. So, this is a really fun one. And you know, I don’t know about you, but if your grandkids come and stay for a week or have granny camp or whatever, this would be a great thing to really do with them. So, I want to tell you two things before we look at the flowers and I give you some tips on how to grow the perfect cut flower size bloom because did you know that the right size cut flower bloom has nothing to do with the variety? It’s the way you spaced it out in the garden, y’all. So, more on that in a minute. So, sunflowers are a member of a group of flowers known as the dirty dozen and they’re called that. Zenas are in that group. Merry golds are in that group. Um and they are the ones that um actually pollute the water. So think about having a bucket of water and you’ve cut a stem and just as you touch the stem bottom to that water surface, an explosion happens, which we don’t really see, right? Well, that stem I mean, you know, a great example, you know how daffodils bleed all that ie stuff? That’s exactly what we’re talking about. More flowers do that. They just don’t do it like daffodils do it in such a a such a noticeable way. So when that stem hits the water, it dumps a bunch of debris into the bucket water and that instantly starts bacteria. That’s the beginning of the journey of the end of your stem’s life because bacteria develops. That’s what takes stems down. So to delay that process and particularly with flowers that are known to dump more stuff, have you ever cut a bunch of Zenyas and you put them in a clear glass vase and you walk by the vase, let’s just say you do it today and tomorrow night you walk past the vase and it’s like, “Oh gross, look at that water.” That’s exactly what that’s all about. It just dumped a bunch of stuff. Bacteria gets busy and it just really turns into a cesspool quickly. Well, in come CVBN tablets. And again, these are down in the ribbon. Um, we now have, this is an 80 pill size bottle. You can buy two bottles with the savings, but we now offer the 800count bottle, which if you’re a flower farmer, what a deal. And now you get 20% off. Um, this is a stable chlorine tablet just like it does. Same thing for your flowers, which a pool does for people. It keeps it safe in there. Um, so we put one of these into every bucket, every harvest bucket on this farm. Um, but particularly the dirty dozen ones. So if you were trying to make choices, um, you know, you would definitely become familiar with who those are that dirty the water most, but we just put them in all the buckets and that delays that process, right? And all the instructions are included right on the bottle. Um, but that just gives your stems the first drink that fills their stems up. Instead of them sucking up bacteria up into the stem, they suck up clean bacteriaree water. Right? So, CVBN is just part of standard operating procedure around here. Now, if you’ve hung around with me for more than a minute, um you may have heard me mention before that needy flowers, flowers that tend to wilt easier at harvest, um I think of basil, some of the rude beckas that have really big blooms, they can just no matter what you do, they still wilt, right? Um so, based on what a veteran flower arranger shared with me years ago, we started using this is called Quick Dip. This is a hydrator. Um, and you’ll also find this down in the ribbon. Um, and she shared with me, we used to use it to dip those stems that we come out the next morning and the Rebecca is still droopy. I’d say, “All right, recut the stems and let’s just dip it in some of the quick dip.” Quick dip. Literally, you just dip the barely the ends of the stems into it. It dilates um the vessels in the stem and allows water to get up. That’s why they wilt. They don’t get enough water up the stem. So, we’ve done that for years. Hydrangeas, roses, anything you’ve got that has head down, this is what fixes all that. However, she also told me that in stressful conditions, she puts two tablespoons of quick dip into her harvest buckets or her buckets for her flowers in general. So, Bobo and I had a big old discussion last week. Last week was heat week. It was over 95 degrees every day last week. We had to cut in ridiculous conditions. So, we decided to put two tablespoons of hydrator in every single harvest. And y’all, it changed our world. Look at this. So, if you are a flower farmer and you know how challenging it can be to get basil to not wilt, this basil was harvested last Thursday in the heat. Gosh, it smells so damn good. This is cinnamon basil, by the way. Um, harvested in the heat last Thursday into quick dip. And friends, it is still looking fabulous. I mean, this is what’s really made me really take a look at the whole conditioning process. How in stressful conditions, which heat is a stress, how this can change everything. So, it’s not in the instructions, y’all. Two tablespoons in your harvest bucket. Put it in there with the CVBN. They do totally different things, y’all. CVBN kills bacteria. This helps them to drink up more water quickly and that’s what saves their life, literally. Okay, so that is the story on how you can start different ways to start sunflowers. um what sunflowers I would recommend some of the mixes um to get to know them, but they’re all available individually as well. Um and then um let’s look at some sunflowers and talk about um I mentioned to you that oh I guess I should show you. Here’s the soil blocker that’s not dirty and used. Um, they come that 2-in blocker comes with this nipple and that makes that indention. And again, these are original lad brooks. Um, you just have to be cautious because there are counterfeit soil blockers out there. They even say lad brook on them, but you need to look and see where they’re being shipped from, y’all. Um, they’re half the price and that’s the giveaway. They are not the lad brooks and they do not hold up like they do. All right, so now I want to show you some flowers. So this is the classic orange most known sunflower. And what I want to start with showing you is first off the correct stage to harvest particularly now in the heat of the summer when pests are at their peak. You know we have cucumber beetles, flea beetles, we have grasshoppers um that are just they’re the ones that chew petals like nobody’s tomorrow. And how do we prevent all of that? Right? It’s by the stage that we cut them. And this is it, friends. This, you can’t tell it, but those petals are just I can push them down. They’re just lifting. And they’re not really easy to chew on at this point. And so we, this is the stage to harvest. And they very quickly open indoors safe and sound from pests to this. So you don’t have to worry about that. So that is the stage to harvest. And then the other thing I wanted to share is let’s take a look at this. First off, all of these are orange except for this little group. Um because I plant one type of sunflower a week. We often have a lot of one color. Um this is peach. This is last week’s harvest. Um and when you see them right next to the orange, you can see what a drastic difference there is. These peach are fabulous, y’all. Um, we absolutely love them. And they are just so I mean, particularly earlier in the season, they’re just a really soft color. I thought I had one of these that had chew marks. Look at this. How pretty is that? Um, so all the colors you have, that’s why I recommend you grow the mix and get to know all of these different sunflowers. But here’s the thing I really wanted to share with you. What do you think about that for a sunflower? Look how little that is. My hand behind it. Look how little that is. You know what that is? That is the top selling size of sunflower I sold for 20 years. People think those big clunky sunflowers are what they want to grow. But that in fact is not true. Because if they’re so hard to use, that’s why they’re sometimes a hard sell to your commercial customers at first because they’re thinking of those thick stemmed big headed sunflowers that are just not very useful. And friends, these are the perfect size sunflowers. How to make a bouquet so much easier. And I will say that a lot of people don’t even recognize these as sunflowers. Sunflowers last long in the vase. Um they’re just absolutely such a great player in a bouquet or a commercial setting. Um that’s what makes these I mean how many hundreds of these could you sell in the fall to commercial customers? Tons, y’all. Um and so but you have to change them. I think this little guy right here is blooming perfect. So how do you control that? you. This depending on the spacing, this little guy can grow like this or this little guy will grow 12 in. Why? And what’s the difference? How tight together you actually plant them. We plant them pretty tight. 6 in apart in all area in all in all um spacing. Um and even closer in the longer days of summer when there’s more hours in the day to grow. They can grow bigger even though you’ve been doing everything early in the season they’ll be like this and late in the season they’ll be like this but in the middle of the season like where we are right now um they’re you’re doing everything the same but they all of a sudden get bigger. That’s because there’s more hours and daylight that’s going on. So we tighten them down to even 4 in close together. And so friends, you control the size. And when you grow sunflowers more like 3 to 4 in, you’re going to find they’re going to be in demand and everybody wants them. Um, they last forever in the vase and they’re just pretty dead spectacular. Now, I mentioned earlier um that there’s several different oranges in the pro cut family. Trying to find really good examples. Um, so this is the classic orange sunflower. Notice where the bloom is facing. It’s facing you, right? And it’s kind of up against the stem. This works great around in a bouquet, but you can’t use this on top, right? And enter horizon. Look how that bloom. This is how it was bred to be, y’all. This is the one you’re going to pop down the middle of your bouquet and have it facing upward. So, and this will rock your florist world if you’re selling to them or if you’re just making bouques yourself. This is going to change everything. Um, and that’s one of the reasons our that bouquet mix I was telling you about has four different um oranges in it. It has horizon, it has orange, it has brilliance. Brilliance looks like orange, but it has a um a glowing orange yellow kind of halo around it. And then there’s an orange XL which is a deeper hue. Y’all, you just can’t go wrong. But I love Horizon. And this is available individually. Um and again, remember we’re doing Christmas in July, 20% off. Just remember to use Santa um in your check at your checkout. Um and oh, thank you, Jesse. And that is good through July 7th. Um there’s only a couple of exclusions. previous purchases, online um not online courses. I had my piece of paper here. I’ve already forgotten, y’all. Gift certificates um and my club membership. And this does that 20% off, y’all. Does apply to our courses. Um that means the big schools, any of the workshops, you know, we have workshops by Jenny Love on how to hold a workshop on your farm. There’s seed starting, there’s a home gardener, um cutting garden. Um check it out. Use Santa and you get 20% off. So, you control the size of the sunflowers. And um you know, it’s all about your spacing. Harvest at the right time. Grow the right varieties. Plant them week after week. By planting the same family of sunflowers, you stay on the same timeline, y’all. So, if you plant every week, you should have sunflowers every week. And that makes all the difference in the world. So friends, I am going to check out here now and um please remember to grow some sunflowers. It can change your gardening experience um and your birds and your bouques and your commercial customers. Um sunflowers get kind of written off, but it’s because of what I mentioned. Most people grow sunflowers big clunkers, thick stems. That’s not what we want and that’s not what I sold for two decades. Um I’ve often shared when we just had our big open farm here this past weekend and it was so spectacular y’all. So I’m in southeastern Virginia. We had people from California, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee. I mean friends, it was so humbling for me. I talked for six hours outside in the heat. drank nine bottles of water and it was the best day ever. I just absolutely loved it. And one of the things that um I one of the stories that I used to share all the time that I don’t mention very often is, you know, when I I farmed for 10 years before I and I’m a city. I’m in the middle of the city, right? I farmed for 10 years before I got a tractor with implements. Um and when I got that tractor with implements, that’s what allowed me to grow sunflowers um in a big way, 1,200 a week. 26 weeks a year and one year, one season of sunflowers paid for that $34,000 John Deere tractor. But I couldn’t have done it without the tractor, you know? I mean, sunflowers are powerful, but you often have to educate people and it is so worth it. So, friends, until we meet again, and I appreciate everybody that’s here, please give us a thumbs up, subscribe so you don’t miss any. Um, and share us with your friends. And don’t forget, it’s Christmas in July, y’all. Until July 7th, you’re you’re never going to forget the promotion code Santa. All right, friends. Until we meet again. Ciao.