Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Here’s a whole post on all the awesomeness of sunflowers, their many many strengths, and why you should put them in your garden or farm.

I mean, I love sunflowers. So let’s get the obvious out of the way…they’re stunningly beautiful.

With so many varieties out there, I typically order a multi-pack or a few different varieties, with some on the short side, some on the enormous side, single-head, and multi head multi branch sunflowers, yellow, orange, red, and otherwise. I seed them into 72-cell trays sometime in late May, so I can transplant them as I need them.

I use sunflowers as utilitarian “gap-fillers.” So maybe an eggplant dies, or a pepper plant gets knocked down by a cutworm, or I have a 50/50 bed and there’s a natural spot between two crops. So I randomly plant sunflowers here and there throughout the season. This also gives me a delayed flowering, so they’re not all flowering at once.

I also might keep planting them into July, not even expecting them to flower. Their taproots are very useful for soil biology, and they are also in my cover crop mix. The produce a large amount of biomass that can be shredded or knocked down later.

Here’s one in an Eggplant bed.

The #1 thing I use sunflowers for is diversity magnets. Even with just 5, 10, 15 or 20 sunflowers scattered randomly through our one acre of no-till creates little pockets of micro habitats and niches. Many, many things are attracted to sunflowers. Bees of course, but ladybugs and their larvae, hoverflies, frogs, and all sorts of things will be found using various parts of the vigorous plant structures.

They are also home to stinkbugs. Now stinkbugs might be a pain for you, if they’re sticking their proboscis into your otherwise perfect tomatoes….but they are around, and therefore, as an insect that is a potential pest, we need to offer a wider range of food for them, and also attract things that eat them so their populations can stay in balance.

This remains one of my favourite-ever photos I’ve taken…three little stinkbugs, marching in a row up a sunflower leaf.

In 2022, for some reason, my dad obtained a few kilos of random sunflower seeds. What would we ever use such an absurd amount of seed for? Well time for experiments, obviously! On two acres of pumpkins, I planted rows of sunflowers mixed in with the pumpkin rows. The result was, still, to this day, one of the most awesome experiments I’ve ever run. The amount of creatures attracted to this pumpkin patch was remarkable. Hundreds of birds eating seeds, and uncountable insects and pollinators.

Oh, and we also got boatloads of sunflowers!

Some of them were in excess of 3 metres! Here’s my (very short) mother for scale.

They are very, very useful for pollinators. In my case, I’m trying to get my honey bees a little extra pollen at the very end of the season. The bees take that pollen, ferment it, and use it to feed their developing larvae. So the timing here is really important…natural, real pollen near the end of the season, in September, really helps drive the building of a winter nest and as such, helps to successfully overwinter the bees.

I assume the same is true for bumble bees, because they’re also all over this late-season food source. I’m not so sure about bumblebee biology or seasonal timing, but perhaps it plays a role for the solitary queen to overwinter.

Lastly, in those cover crop mixes.

Sunflowers are not a big component of my cover crops, but they are there. The variety included in the mix is a shorter, single-head one. Usually by the time I’m shredding the cover crop, they are maybe only starting to flower, and they don’t go to seed. The larger seed size means everything else in the mix – the sorghum, millet, rye, and so on – goes through the seeder much easier than the larger sunflowers or peas. But in this context, we are looking for a multi-species mix to achieve a group effect on soil biology and nutrient cycling. They won’t get much more than one meter tall. Here’s a late-season cover crop from 2024, with a handful of sunflowers poking out among the grasses.

In conclusion, plant sunflowers.

Liberally, randomly, or in excess. Just plant them!

(they’re also great photo subjects).

There’s a new YouTube video out today as well, so check out what’s going on during peak season here at the farm!

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice

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