Cheerful Faces That Shines Happiness

Sowing sunflower flowering in your garden is like scattering happiness across your plot and your neighbours too. Sunflowers just scream ‘Hello summer, Hello sun, Hello happiness’.

More sunflowers should be grown. Their cheerful faces track the sun as it screens across your garden. It makes you just to want to pick them by the armful and fill the house with their extravagance, brightness and glamour. In my garden, I use them to create a little rhythm architecturally, adding height and late summer colour to the back of my beds, which can be a little flat by the end of the Summer months.

Sunflowers are a very happy medium for nature, as bees flock to them, along with other insects during their flowering times. Then it’s good to leave them standing as bird feeders until that time when they are nothing more than stripped-bare, weather-worn stems for earwigs and other creepeies, to hunker down in over winter.

Sunflowers are greedy, greedy things. It is said that if you want to sow a wildflower meadow and need to impoverish the soil, then you should sow a sunflower meadow first. They suck up all sorts from the soil. They do such a good job that they are starting to be used for bioremediation, which is sucking up pollutants, even nuclear radiation, from the soil, cleaning it up as they grow. If you’re growing them in the vegetable garden, or allotment, it’s worth remembering this, and following with something replenishing, field beans, or winter tares, to put nitrogen and organic matter back into the soil.

Although you can get away with growing sunflowers in thin soils, as long as they sit in the sun, they do best in rich, organic, free-draining conditions. You can sow direct now if your soil feels warm, or you can sow indoors on windowsills, with a single seed to each 9cm pot. To sow outside from April until May, is the norm time, place two seeds per position, 45cm apart, thinning to the strongest seedling. If you start off your seedlings on a windowsill, or in a cold frame, however, they’ll need to be repotted often; nothing makes them more upset than to come to the bottom of the pot and have nowhere else to grow.

You can sow the seeds later, as I have sown seeds in July, then two weeks you will start seeing the seedlings and around 52 days later they will flower and flourish in the late summer sunshine.

There are numerous varieties to choose from: like the little dwarf hybrids, the giants, multi-headed forms and those for food production. Most sunflowers are the traditional yellow with the dark amber face, but you can get the fuzzy ginger nut variety which lacks the face but makes up for it with fuzziness appeal. Red coloured varieties of sunflowers add a nice mix and if you go for tall you may well grow a record breaker in height. Sunflowers are really the fun of the garden.