The roadsides are lined with yellow and orange wild sunflowers of many kinds. This year giant sunflowers are growing in my garden.
Last Year
Seed catalogs have lots of pictures of many varieties of sunflowers. Most are strictly pretty flowers. A few will produce edible seeds.
Some of these are giant sunflowers growing to ten feet or more. A packet of Mongolian Giants was added to the seed order just for fun.
Wind can be a problem for tall plants. After some thought, I placed the sunflowers along a tall deer fence so I could tie them up, if necessary.
The problem was how edible sunflowers are. Deer reached through the fence. Groundhogs crawled through. Only one plant, hidden inside yet another wire ring, survived.
This plant grew tall although a few leaves disappeared. It produced a large flower head. No bird even looked at this treat as every seed was empty.
This Year
I had left over seeds. A different fence was selected, an interior one. And the plants grew. And grew.
Giant sunflowers are giants. Some of these must be ten feet tall and tower over me as well as the tomatoes growing on the other side of the fence and the okra trying to grow alongside of them.
Now these giants are blooming. Interestingly, the heads open only about six inches across then steadily get bigger. They start facing out toward the sun and later bend down.
Just For Fun
Although we like eating sunflower seeds, there won’t be enough to last very long. The birds will probably get many of the seeds as the flower heads are too far overhead to bag.
The packets boast how tall the plants get. I remember county fair entries of these as people vied for who could grow the tallest ones.
We won’t enter these in any fairs as our county fairs are now past. However, these giant sunflowers have been fun to grow.