I have a Sunday ritual this season. Start one tray of sunflower seeds and plant out the tray of sunflowers that were started two weeks ago.
You may be asking yourself, why is she “starting” sunflower seeds? They are easy to grow and have great germination rates, just throw those babies in the ground and move on.
Remember the voles? Well, as it turns out, they like sunflower seeds too.
And so do mice, and birds, and squirrels, and many insects.
In my first season of flower farming, I planted out several successions of sunflower seeds only to discover that something decided to snack on the tender baby leaves as soon as they emerged from the soil. And other times, they never made it that far because something decided to snack on the actual sunflower seed. I get it, sunflower sprouts are delicious, and sunflower seeds do make a great snack. But these seeds are for my flowers!!!
Determined to be successful at sunflowers, I decided to try starting the seeds and planting out a slightly bigger plant with at least one set of true leaves – and it worked!
I have been planting sunflower starts every week since March – it was very risky to plant them out that early because a hard freeze or even a prolonged frost could take them out. But this year luck was on my side and spring came early. I have been basking in the glow of beautiful sunflowers ever since!!
My plan is to have sunflowers until the first frost takes them out. This means that at some point I will lose starts and plants that are in the field, but I’m willing to take that risk. I would rather lose plants late in the season than not have flowers if the frost is late this year.
I grow on a small scale so this process is manageable for me. It would be very labor intensive for a larger grower to do this every week. This process also means that I can’t miss a week of my ritual because a week missed means no sunflowers at the market. And sunflowers are beautiful so that would just be unacceptable in my opinion.