Couple’s crop grows to over 10 feet tall
By Donna M. Perry
Staff Writer

STRONG – When Barbara and John McCarthy planted sunflower seeds in their backyard they hadn’t imagined such giant-sized flowers. They didn’t expect a mini forest of flowers.

“It must be the Maine soil,” Barbara McCarthy said as she and her husband looked up at the flowers. “I had sunflowers in Connecticut but they weren’t that tall.”

Some of the blossoms at the top of about 60, 10-foot-plus sunflowers had opened into large, “daisylike” flowers with darker yellow disks and seeds. Most of the blossoms hadn’t opened yet.

The stalks on these whoppers are about 2 inches.

The McCarthy’s moved to Maine from Connecticut in December. John, originally from northern Maine, owns a camp with friends on Day Mountain Road in Temple and visited the county over the last two decades. He liked this area and had been looking for a log cabin and some acreage when he found the property the couple settled into on Pillsbury Road in Strong.

The couple planted a garden, Barbara said, and thought they adhered to neighbors’ warnings not “to overdo it.”

So they planted a small garden. But from that plot they’ve gotten more cucumbers, tomatoes and summer squash than they can handle. They’ve been giving them away, she said.

There are some stunted sunflowers that have large flowers with thick stalks that are less than 4-feet tall, but the couple didn’t plant those.

Barbara believes the birds may have dropped some seeds.

“I feed my birds very good,” she said.

She walked back to the patch of sunflowers, she pulled back the leaves and revealed string and stakes holding the stalks.

“I’ve had to stake them twice,” she said. “I was afraid they would fall over.”

In addition to Maine’s good soil, McCarthy said the land had been fertilized by cattle prior to the couple buying their home, and her handy rain barrel of water mixed with Miracle Gro has helped the garden along.

dperry@sunjournal.com