Great Balls of Dirt

I thought I was through writing about sunflowers, but there is always clean up to consider. It occurred to me, of course, that for a plant to grow as thick and as tall as a sunflower, it had to have roots. But, having never seen a sunflower root before, I didn't quite know what to expect. Each plant was pretty well anchored with a good thick ball of roots. I wasn't successful uprooting plants until I used the garden fork to loosen dirt around the base of the plant. But even then, the root came up as a large ball. Indeed, taking care of each sunflower was about like trying to deal with a small tree.

The next challenge I faced was just how to get to dirt off of the root. In a raised bed, dirt is precious. And it is apparent that a lot of whatever was in the dirt was up in the air in the stalk of the sunflower plant. Many of the stalks were about an inch in diameter at the base. My solution to getting the dirt off involved finding yet another use for the cold frame hoops. I primarily use the cold frames to brace myself while I bend over the garden boxes. The second use is when I grow tomatoes, as a way of anchoring the cages so they don't blow over when the tomatoes get big and the wind blows. Their use for me as a device to hold up plastic sheeting in the winter is in doubt. (I wasn't very successful growing things in the past this way.) So now the next use is as something to bang the root ball against to get the dirt attached to the roots of sunflowers off and back into the raised bed.