Sunflowers
It’s been a minute since we chatted about the top 10 plants to start in your cutting garden, so let’s take this windy, rainy day to get back on that horse.
Sunflowers are generally pretty darn easy to grow if you can get past the seed part. We’ll get to that part in a minute, but let’s talk about the difference between branching and single stem sunflowers. Imagine you’re driving through some rolling hills in the middle of the country and you’re surrounded by the bright polka dot faces of sunflower blooms as big as your head or larger.
These are single stem sunflowers usually grown for seed and oil. The stalks on those guys can be massive. 2 - 3 inches in diameter is not unreasonable, which make it pretty hard to use in any kind of mixed bouquets, but looks pretty impressive as a gathered bunch of 5 - 10 stems of the same variety. One and done, they grow to incredible heights and create a pretty beautiful, linear sense in a garden, but when they are finished in the late summer, that’s it. No more flowers for you.
Then there are branching varieties of sunflowers, which are also part of the cut-and-come-again informal grouping of flowers I was mentioning when we were talking about Zinnias and Cosmos.
Like their single stemmed cousins, branching sunflowers will grow to incredible heights, and boast a very sturdy 1 - 2 inch central stem, but the stems that grow the flowers themselves generate from that central stem and are much more manageable for design. Depending on variety, they can grow in clusters or radiating around the central stem on alternating stems, and they come in a variety of colors.
I’ll be honest, sunflowers are my least favorite flower to work with. The high contrast of the black and white in a traditional flower makes it hard to be subtle with color shift or tone. And the worst case they look like eyeballs staring out from an arrangement at you. But I do think those traditional sunnies look amazing in a garden and will be adding a number of them to my own plantings.
PLANTING
So let’s talk about how. Firstly, these guys are a true summer annual so you really do want to wait to start the seeds unless you have a heated area or heat mats to put them on. I rarely will start sunflowers outside because you have to plant 3 for the birds and 1 for the farmer, and I have to run a tighter ship than that. So I make sure that start mine in a warm spot about 4-6 weeks before I’m ready to plant them outside. When it’s time to transplant, handle it the same way as we covered in Zinnias & Cosmos, and try not to disturb their root system as much as possible. Single stem varieties can go 8 - 10 inches apart, branching varieties need 12-18 to give them room to grow out and up.
HARVEST
Harvest isn’t anything special. Clean snips, clean water, and away you go. At the end of the season, I like to leave them in place until the birds have had their fill and then I cut the stalk down to about 6 inches above the ground. In spring, when it’s time to plant again, I usually plant something else in that spot and move what’s left of the stalk to the compost pile at that point having let the root system fully disintegrate over the winter and early spring months.
There are some really beautiful varieties of sunflower that aren’t the traditional yellow and black if you want to play with color in your cutting garden. Read the description to determine if it’s single stem or branching. Have fun!
