Sunflowers are iconic for their large yellow flowers and super tall stalks. While you may think the name comes from their appearance, the real reason they are called sun flowers is because they face the sun and track it from east to west throughout the day. In addition to being great flowers for your garden, they also produce edible seeds that are great for both humans and birds alike.
Sunflower Details
- Family: Asteraceae
- Growing Season: Spring
- Growing Zones: 3 through 10
- Spacing: 18-24 inches (46-61 cm) apart
- Seed to Harvest time: 70-90 days
- Indoor Starting: Not recommended
- Earliest Planting: After the danger of last frost
- Watering: Water when soil is dry, keeping soil moist, but never wet. Do not over water.
- Sunlight Requirements: Full sun
- Planting: plant seeds 1 inch (2.5cm) deep.
- Weeding: Sunflowers often outpace weeds, but weeding should be performed weekly.
- Harvesting: Sunflowers are ready for harvesting once their heads droop
- Known Pests: Cutworms, apply BT (Bacillus thuringiensis)
More About Sunflowers
Sunflowers are interesting flower since they grow so tall and so large. Typically grown in rows they can easily act as border flowers on a property. Sunflowers produce a huge amount of seeds, so once you start growing them you can easily keep them planted year after year. The seeds then have additional uses as either food, a source of pressed oil, or feed for birds.
One of the features we don’t often talk about with sunflowers is their ability to help out our local pollinators. Some studies have suggested that sunflower pollen, which is abundant given the size of the flowers, can help strengthen the immune systems of bees and other pollinators while also keeping them properly fed. This is a huge benefit for any homestead garden as healthy pollinators lead to a healthy garden.
Sunflower Tasting and Food Notes
Sunflower seeds have a variety of uses in the kitchen. While they are great roasted or raw, sunflower seeds can also be milled into a flour for baking. Sunflower seeds can be pressed for oil too, but it takes a lot of them to yield even a small amount of oil.
Sunflower seeds have a nutty rich taste to them. They are a bit richer and oilier than peanuts in relation to their taste.
Sunflower seeds can be tough to shell. If you’re doing it by hand it would take you hours to get through even the seeds produced from a single head. The best method is to add the seeds to a bag and lightly roll them out with a rolling pin, being sure not to press to hard. From here you can add the rolled seeds to some water and the kernels will sink while the shells will float. This allows you to skim off the shells and retrieve the kernels from the water to dry and use as you please from there.
Should I Grow Sunflowers In My Garden?
Given how good sunflowers are for pollinators and their multiple uses, you should definitely grow sunflowers if you have the space for them. Sunflowers are big and beautiful and offer you so much with such little care that it would be silly to not at least consider them in homestead garden.