Sunflowers Deployed

Sunflower Setup in Vacant Lot

Urban Garden

Our sunflower experiment is underway! After a long few months of growing sunspot variety sunflowers from seed, they are finally in bloom. We deployed 8 sunflowers at each of our Cleveland sites (8 urban garden and 8 vacant lot) for a total of 128 plants! We will leave them out for a week to measure the pollination services available to both landscapes.

As you can see from the above setup, 4 plants are grouped together, 2 with bags covering the blooms, and 2 left open. The bags prevent half of the sunflowers from being pollinated by bees. When the sunflowers set seed this fall, we will compare the seed count and weight between the bagged and unbagged flowers. This difference gives us a measure of the pollination services the bees provide.

Urban Garden

Vacant Lot