Sunflowers are one of the easiest and sunniest and brightest things that you can
add to your garden to get both ornamental and edible value.
Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow greener thumb. This thing is almost as.
Big as my head. Look at that! Just kidding. It's still half the size of.
My head, which makes me really sad about the size of my head. Nevertheless,
we are going to talk today about different varieties of sunflower you can grow,
different strategies for growing them, where they make sense to grow,
all the different conditions of them, all that kind of stuff.
So cultivate that Like button and I will bless you with a sunflower bigger than
my head, which is hard to do. And let's get into the video.
Sunflowers are native to North America, which is pretty cool.
We have some plants that are really popular, that are native here,
that have kind of made it all around the world. Dry beans, corn,
things like that. Indigenous Americans cultivated this about 5,000 years ago,
it's thought to be, for seed in the Southwest of the US, which is where I live.
So that's pretty cool.
What's wild is by about 1550 sunflowers had spread through Europe,
through Africa, through Russia.
And by 1700 there were early patents for oil extraction methods.
In Russia specifically,
what was really interesting is it's too hard to grow olives there for olive oil.
So sunflowers were grown and cultivated and then pressed for their oil.
Let's get into some sunflower types. You have two major sort of split offs.
You have the confectionery style, which has the white stripe,
the ones that you might eat out of a sunflower seed packet like I did growing
up. And then you have the black oil sunflowers,
which are commonly grown as sunflowers for microgreens.
Those ones contain up to twice as much oil, which is why they have that name.
Let's take a closer look at the actual sunflower head itself.
It's made of two types of flowers.
These ones right here are called the ray flowers.
And then inside you have all these tiny little disc flowers,
and those are what actually get pollinated and become the sunflower seeds.
So when you're growing sunflowers, what you have to know is the growth habits,
the growth patterns.
What they'll do is they'll throw up vertical growth until they reach what's
called their terminal height.
About as high as their genetics will let them get to.
And that's when they'll throw out the sunflower head.
And now here's something that's really surprising about sunflowers.
The name and some of the myth around them suggest that they're heliotropic,
or they follow the sun. Now that can happen.
It seems like it actually does happen, at least in my garden,
earlier on in their life when they're younger.
But now every single sunflower that I have,
every single one unless it's a multiheaded sunflower, is facing east,
which tends to be what happens as they mature.
So it's actually a little bit awkward because every single one of the sunflowers
in my front yard garden is facing east and my front yard garden faces west.
So it's like they're too cool for school. But it's kind of an interesting fact,
because a lot of the times you'll hear that they just follow the sun no matter
what. Here's another fun fact before we get into the growing information.
Sunflowers, as you'll find,
are pretty easy to grow and they're actually quite good as just a straight up
cover crop that adds some beauty to the top of the landscape. But what they do,
it's kind of like other plants that are called dynamic accumulators,
they go down really really deep, up to four feet deep, in the subsoil.
And of course they're taking nutrients,
they're taking minerals from the ground and bringing it up into the plant
matter. Which then of course, at the end of the season, you use the seeds,
do whatever you want with those.
And then you can chop and compost or just chop and drop right on top of the
surface of the soil.
And voila you've brought nutrients up from way down below up to the top to
improve your soil.
Let's talk now about growing sunflowers and some of the varieties that you can
choose.
This is the most fun part of the process because you get to really select what
the garden's going to look like.
I'll put my favorite varieties up in the corner over here.
Let's talk about a couple things you want to know before you get to planting.
The first one is, there are some that are bred to have no pollen,
which is really for the cut flower industry.
And you want to avoid those varieties because they're not going to have any
beneficial effects for you as far as attracting pollinators.
All that kind of stuff is just out the window if you have the no pollen
varieties. The other thing you need to know when planting sunflowers is,
sometimes they have an inhibitive effect on things like pole beans and potatoes.
So you wouldn't want to interplant with those types of crops.
But it seems like for anything else you're good to go.
Next up is the actual color selection and the size selection. So I,
as you can see,
have all sorts of different types of sunflowers popped around different spots of
the garden.
In the tomato trellis back there I used a giant mammoth style with a big yellow
classic sunflower head. In the melon patch back there,
I believe I have autumn something, I forgot the name.
But it's a multiheaded lower grower,
great to sprinkle through the middle of a row. But these things come in pink,
green, gray, all sorts of different colors. Multicolored, multiheaded.
So there's tons and tons of varieties to choose.
Let's talk starting seeds for sunflowers. It's actually quite simple.
First of all, you don't have to soak a sunflower seed,
although it will speed up the germination process.
So you can soak it for about four to eight hours or so.
That'll let the water get through the seed hull and of course just speed
germination up. But again, you don't have to do that. In fact,
you don't really have to soak any seed if you don't want to as long as you're
keeping your growing medium wet enough for water to get through.
So here I have the autumn beauties that are sitting out in my cantaloupe and
melon patch. This is a really small sunflower seed.
They come in all different shapes, sizes. These ones are quite tiny.
But for the most part, the rules are the same.
Plant it about an inch deep in your mixture.
I've got some seed starting trays here. These are the Epic six cell trays.
The thing about it, if you're going to transplant it,
is it has a decent sized taproot. Any plant that has a taproot,
you don't want to damage the taproot when you're transplanting.
Which is why I like the Epic six cells,
because they've got that hole at the bottom where the taproot can actually come
out undamaged, which is kind of nice. So if you want to,
you can plant your seeds pointy side down.
Because if you think about when a sunflower seed sprouts,
the thicker side of the seed is the side that's on the top that you kind of
sometimes have to pull off those two seed leaves. So that's what I would do.
When in doubt,
you could just plant it sideways and it'll come up how it comes up,
not really a big deal.
But I will say I would probably be direct sowing these sunflower seeds,
if you can. Just because of that taproot thing.
You don't want to mess the transplant up.
And if you've got the space and you have the time and the conditions are warm
enough, direct sow it and you're good to go.
Let's assume you have your sunflower growing.
It's out in the field and maybe you're running into some problems.
The first problem is not enough light. You're gonna want to give it,
it's a sunflower guys, six plus hours of sun a day at least I would say.
Probably on the eight side, if I were you.
The other thing you can run into is wilting.
You can see this one's kind of wilting.
It's mostly because it's really mature and the seeds are forming and that's
heavy and it's pulling it down. But if you see it wilt before this point,
good chance you've underwatered it. Another thing you could run into is,
what if you don't even have this flowerhead at all,
you're not seeing any flowers. Could be too much fertilizer.
They don't really want to be pumped full of fertilizer.
Remember it's a four foot taproot that's going down.
There's plenty of late nutrition in the soil. It's going to do just fine.
So don't overfertilize.
Another reason for poor flower formation is just it's not light enough.
So again, refer back to just giving it more sun.
Let's talk now about some pests and problems you might run into.
You may run into some mildew issues. You may run into some birds,
some caterpillars, some moths. Usually those will want to munch on the foliage.
It's not a huge deal. It seems like sunflowers can lose quite a few,
especially of the lower leaves, and they're completely fine.
Mine often like to shed those when they get to this higher height and they kind
of have that terminal flower.
It seems like they kind of just say goodbye to the ones down below.
But if you are going to use the sunflowers to save the seeds for next season or
to eat the seeds, which I'm going to do with this head right here,
then you can run into a couple other pests. First of all,
the larva of any of the ones I just talked about, can come in and eat.
But then there's the sunflower moth which, as the name implies,
likes to target these seeds.
The larva will come through and just bore right through them.
So you're gonna have to handpick those off or spray the actual plant with BT,
which is a really,
really good organic pesticide for dealing with any sort of larval form of pest.
But if you want to, that's what I would do, otherwise just hand pick them off.
So you've grown your sunflower,
it has a beautiful head and there some delicious seeds and you want to know when
to harvest them. Remember,
we talked about the ray flowers on the outside of the sunflower,
as well as the disc flowers on the inside. When the ray flowers have fallen off,
that's your first signal that you're getting close to harvest.
But then what you want to do is look at the back of the head of the sunflower.
It should start turning yellow, it'll turn even more yellow.
And then the ribs of that back will start to turn green to brown.
And that's when you know that it's fully ready to harvest.
What you do at that point is just snip the head off, let it dry in a cool,
well ventilated space. You can let it dry on the plant too,
but it just kind of wastes space. So you might want to rip the plants out,
chop up the stalks,
put those in your compost and then cut the head off and put it somewhere else.
And if you want to see me actually take that head that I just showed you and eat
the entire thing before the seeds are actually ready - this is something I
recently learned that you can do.
I'm going to eat the entire sunflower head over on the Epic Homesteading
channel, including the recipe.
So go Subscribe to that one if you're interested in seeing that.
Hopefully this gave you the tips you need to grow sunflowers.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.