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.
