Sunflowers - Early Bloomers

One of the great things about fall is that if you have been taking photos of the garden over the last few months, then you have a nice chunk of snapshots to showcase the span of a project. Our sunflower field was no exception to that. We had read and heard a tip from many growers to plant sunflower seeds in succession - a method where you make many plantings every 1-2 weeks over the growing season. But, we had also heard about planting varieties who's bloom times were in succession for same effect - instead of having to replant every week or so, just mix the bloom times.

So here is a shot of my 60,70,80 day blooming sunflower seeds all mixed up and ready to go

On one of the hottest days of the summer, near the last week of July - Dumpling had planted them all. All 10,000 of them! Here he is using the Earthway seeder (set on the corn setting) at about 70 days out, hoping for a nice range time time for blooms.

Irrigation and fish emulsion fertilizer on automatic timers were ready to go. We had previously enriched the soil 3 months prior with a thick cover of buckwheat, then tilled under to provide great soil and nutrients for the bed.

Things were off to a great start for sure!

About 2-3 weeks into growing, my foot prints are visible since I took our tiny little mantis tiller between each of the rows to til up the surface weeds - just to make sure the sunflowers growth was always a step ahead of the grasses! I only had to do this 1 time, then the shade from the top growth blocked the weeds.

About 3 weeks into it they were looking lovely! August heat wave was helping them out.

They really took off at about the 3-4 week mark and were thriving in all the heat, rain, and enriched soil. Was alittle alarmed that they all were forming heads so early - like 30 days out!

Imagine my surprise at seeing the 45 day mark....

Bam! These babies were bustin with blooms 45 days after planting!

Pro-Cut sunflowers are simply great for arrangements! They have no pollen to drop on your table or stain your clothing while you are cutting them.

And regardless of what the package said - they all came at once!
Our farm was covered in an ocean of sunflowers in alittle under 2 months!

Was able to sell buckets to local florists and brought bunches of them into the office every morning where i work, co-workers and their families bought some fresh cut from the field. Also got a few calls once I listed them under the farm section of craigslist.

Suns are by far the easiest flower to grow. The labor - was in laying the irrigation, planting the seeds, running the tiller throught the rows 1 time to prevent weeds, then harvesting them.

Some take-away lessons from the sunflower experiment were:

Procut and Lemon variety were the best of the bunch - opt for the Florist grade variety.

Realize there is no short-cut around succession planting.

Sunflowers need to be planted once every two weeks throughout the summer to get a steady stream of flowers for marketing.

No real problems with insects. The lower leaves that were munched on, ended up being stripped from the stalk anyways to make bouquets - so it was no biggie.

Using the buckwheat cover crop really did a good job at preventing weeds, only did 1 day of tilling/weed control.

It is Ok to cut these just before they are starting to open, and ideal to minimize petals from being damaged from any insects.

We had planted suns earlier in the spring and summer, but alot of people were surprised we had planted these towards the end of july, but from the weather we experienced here in Virginia - we could have easily kept succession planting up until the end of August/first week of September with no problems!

For the summer flowers in general, Zinnias and Sunflowers are the 2 easiest flowers to grow and market, and most widely recognized by customers and florist alike - you can't go wrong with incorprating them into your farm or garden! Because they were multi-branching, I did actually like the zinnias timing better - plant once, get tons of flowers from each seed for a span of over 2 months, but the sunflowers are so special, it is worth the extra work for succession planting. The only sad part about sunflowers is that you get 1 flower per seed, as opposed to 20 flowers per stem on Zinnias.

Most of all - Don't try to coordinate or plan a huge event around blooming flowers, this advice is even more critical if they are of the single stemed variety.

Nature, as with alot of things in this world, cannot be timed :)

Next summer we are going to increase the variety of flowers we grow here on the farm, so we can have more selections to make diverse bouquets.

I have a feeling that Pro-Cut sunflowers and Benaries Giant Zinnias will always be our 2 main flowers though.