The second sunflower - it's a whopper

Way way way back at the start of the year when I visited my parents in Adelaide and saw that they had a sunflower I was bitten by the bug to grow one of my own. Given that they had a full garden bed to work with and I had only small pots at best (as if I was going to devote one of the larger pots to this experiment) I decided smaller, dwarfish style Sunflowers would be my best bet. I have posted on the sunflowers before and the main flower in that post was the first to flower and had several heads. It is still going, although I pruned the dead heads today, leaving these two lovely orange/yellow flowers.

Now as for the other one, he was a slow bloomer. Instead he wanted to grow up, and up, and, well, up! It was only the other day when he finally flowered that I realised the bloom itself was much more yellow than his companion. These photographs aren't the best, but at over 2 metres tall (the sunflower, not me, I barely make it to five foot 2) this bloom really isn't the easiest to photograph. I stood on a chair on the balcony which was slippery after a nice Winter shower, not the best time to be precariously perched, especially given how accident prone I am!

Thing is, he is over a metre taller than his companion too! To get an idea of his size I have taken various photographs of the balcony and cannot decide which one shows its insanity best so here they all are. Yes those are the penthouse apartments on the floor above me you can see in one of the pictures - he is THAT big!

I have no idea how he got this big. It was an adequately sized pot, a self watering one too and I did give him a lot of water from my shower warm up water (the sunflowers were always thirsty). I guess I did use top level potting mix, the way I do for the veggies and perhaps I fertilised it once, I forget. But whatever the case thise guy is HUGE! And he has several more heads to open. Pity I need a stepladder to film them correctly!