As I wrote in this post, Sakura and I had planted 3 sunflower seeds. We were all excited when Sakura got a “grow your own sunflowers” kit as a gift. We opened it carefully, mixed soil & coco-peat pellets, filled this mixture into the included yellow container (which Sakura decorated creatively with stickers & stuff), and sowed the three seeds as instructed. We watered them regularly but only one of those seeds germinated. And after 6 weeks of taking care of it, we bid that sapling goodbye today. Here are some details about this sad journey.
Week 0 (20/07): We were eager to see the 3 seeds germinate into 3 little saplings. On the morning of 5th day (25/07), we witnessed one seed had broken through the soil cover and sprouted two leaves proudly standing nearly 2 cm tall. Sadly, the other two seeds never germinated. The rest of the story follows this single plant.
Week 1 (27/07): We watered regularly and by regularly I mean everyday, keeping the soil wet but not soggy as instructed. We kept the sapling in the sunshine during afternoons for nearly 3-4 hours daily. (We do not have a place that gets enough sunshine during the morning hours and which is suitable for keeping the plant too.) It sprouted two more leaves and had grown half an inch taller but I forgot to take a photo for this week to document its growth.
Week 2 (03/08): We continued to water the little sapling, keeping it in sunshine, etc. It had sprouted two more tiny leaves between the two newer leaves of the past week and had grown half an inch taller.
Week 3 (10/08): Very much like week 2. It had grown half an inch taller and the tiny leaves had become a bit more prominent. These were exciting times but we also started seeing the oldest two leaves turning yellowish. We were a bit disheartened and started wondering how to increase the sunlight hours or if decreasing the amount of water would help too.
Week 4 (17/08): We started watering it on alternate day as the soil was remaining wet longer and the weather was mostly cloudy. Sunshine hours had decreased drastically too! No new leaves sprouted and the older leaves started looking unwell too. This crashed our hopes of seeing the plant grow any further and even impossible to see any sunflowers blooming on this plant.
Week 5 (24/08): We kept up watering on alternate days and showing it the Sun whenever possible during the cloudy & rainy days of this week. The plant was definitely not doing well and we wondered what had gone wrong. Did the sand not have the right nutrients to start with? Were the seeds not good enough? Did we mess with the water? Or sunlight? We will never know the full answer.
Week 6 (31/08): Nothing much will happen regarding this plant now so here’s the log book which we kept during the last month or so.
In the aftermath, we have bought some indoor plants (Aglaonema Commutatum / Silver Queen), which apparently require no maintenance and need to be watered only once in 10 days. Let's see how these plants fare and whether we can see them around for long.
