It started out simply enough in the summer of 1998. The guy next door gave me a packet of very old sunflower seeds. I planted them, got three nice, tall sunflowers. The following summer, I planted some, and noticed other volunteers. The volunteers were bigger than the parents, so I saved some seed and decided not to be too careful about cleaning up the seeds the birdies miss. Year three, no volunteers came up (there was a drought in 1999), so I planted some of the saved seeds, and get even bigger, taller sunflowers. A few send up a second or third bud after the initial flowers.
Fast forward to last year. I get a zillion volunteers, some growing out of the crack between the edge of the raised bed's wooden boards and the cement patio. I pull most of them, but leave about a dozen scattered plants. The tallest eventually get 12-15 feet high - towering over my trellis, and almost as tall as the peak of my neighbor's garage. They have one large flower, and after that, develop side buds and branches that have more large flowers, then taper off into smaller flowers on the end of each branch. One plant has dozens of large and small flowers, and I seem to be running the goldfinch feeding station for all of Bergen County. My elderly neighbor is out there taking pictures for her scrapbook. I'm taking pictures, too. The plants do have their limits, tho, because the long branches are weak at their forks where they join the main stem, and the longer they get, the more likely they break off under heavy rain or strong wind. A few of the plants also get top heavy with seed and have to be tied up to the trellis. By Labor Day, my raised bed looks like the sunflower rain forest, as the poor tomatoes are growing up overhead between branches in search for the sun. Does not seem to stop them from producing fruit, and I have to stand on a step stool to pick it before the frost gets here from the now-dying sunflowers. Big mess to clean out all those tall things and get the debris into the recycling barrel!
This year, I again have a lot of volunteers. I transplant or give away most of them, leaving what seems like a reasonable number in May. Here it is, July, and I have one plant that is over 8 feet tall, and several that are over 6 feet. I have been striping the bottom two pairs of leaves off the plants so that the tomatoes and everything else that is also thriving will get better light. Bear in mind that this bed is about three feet wide and twenty feet long, and it's two months before these things stop growing! When I transplant them, they do not get as tall as the volunteers I leave in place, but even the row of nine I planted against the house are at least chest high.
The question is: does anyone think there is a market for these mutants? Anyone have any idea how to find out? I can save seed (even if I have to goldfinch-proof a few plants), but I don't have a clue as to what to do after that. Everyone that has seen them has asked me where I got them or where I got the seed. The ones that I give away as transplants seem to do quite well in other places, so it's not just my brown thumb or some peculiar magic in my yard. Apparently, I've stumbled into some genetic mutation magic that works!