the mammoths are back

Packaged up in time for Christmas! The mammoth sunflower seeds I wrote about back in September are back, this time in some little seed packets I printed up.

Designed in Adobe Illustrator, printed with an inkjet printer on charcoal drawing paper and stitched on two sides.

The design work isn't flawless here, but by the time I realized I should have left more space at the top of the envelope, I'd printed the entire run. Which means next year's packets, lesson learned, are going to be impeccable.

The backs are printed with the planting history including family, date, and location that the seeds were grown. We'll save seeds from the biggest flower heads next year and pass those on. Maybe eventually we'll have some real monsters on our hands. 

Sealed up with paper tape from Target and ready to go in this year's gift boxes for the family!

If you want to read about the huge sunflowers we grew this summer, you can read more here!

And just in case you landed here while looking for a story about the cloning of wooly mammoths from frozen DNA, this one's for you. 

mammoth sunflower seeds

My sister-in-law packaged up some seeds a couple of Christmases ago and sent them out to all of us. Over that summer, she and my brother and the kids had grown the Mammoth sunflowers (possible varietal name Russian Mammoth) in the backyard, and we were assured that they'd been HUGE.

They sprouted well, even after more than a year of waiting to be planted. The above photo is from early May, when the seeds we'd started got transferred into the beds.

This one is from late August, when the sunflower stalks surpassed roof height on the studio.

I've grown some sort of Mammoth sunflower in the past, but I don't recall the flowers ending up quite as huge as these. A twelve-foot stalk and a sixteen-inch head were the largest we measured this year; most of the heads were in the twelve-inch range!

I'll be passing them back around this year; I know my sister-in-law is looking forward to keeping the seed swap going!

I have a seed packet design I'll be sharing in a future post, so check back soon if that's your thing!

Thanks for reading!

updated: seed packets? right here!