How to grow sunflowers

Sunflower is a fast-growing summer annual that home gardeners plant for its towering bloom, its edible seed, and the pollinators it draws into a vegetable bed. A single stalk can reach several feet tall in one growing season, tracking the sun while the bud is young, then holding a broad flower head as it ripens through late summer. Gardeners often plant it along a fence line or the back of a bed, where the tall stalks double as a windbreak and light shade for shorter, sun-sensitive crops nearby.

The hardest part of growing sunflower for seed is protecting the head once it starts to mature. University of Georgia Extension notes that birds and squirrels routinely strip seeds from a ripening head before a gardener gets to it. A second-year gardener who grew the plant mainly for the bloom often has not planned for this: by the time the back of the head turns brown, the classic harvest signal, the front has already been picked clean. The seed crop meant to be the payoff of a summer-long stalk ends up empty.