My Love-Hate Affair

I have a sick obsession with sunflowers...they disgust me and yet...I just can't stay away.

When I was a teenager searching for identity I went through a phase where I identified as a sunflower. I had just seen my first bottle of Estee Lauder Sunflowers perfume, probably in a Walmart, considering the availability of department stores to my non-driving self growing up in California's rural central coast, and I was hooked. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced before, sort of warm and salty and sweet, evoking a perfect summer's day eating buttered sweet corn on the cob, like the coconut-tropical sun oil so iconic to the 90s mixed with the fine salty sweat that springs from laying contentedly in the sun. The bright, cheerful yellow packaging pleased and soothed my eye and seemed perfectly, entirely right with the world. I thought about sunflowers a lot, how they turned their dancing heads to the sun and lifted their faces in smiling worship. There was a serenity there that I sought and a beauty, so I took to sitting in sunny spots wherever I could find them, my legs curled under me and my face lifted to the sun, soaking in the warmth, experiencing rare moments of absolute presence.

I didn't actually write this book. My exploits as a half-teenaged girl, half-sun worshipping flower became the stuff of legend.

Sunflowers were my summer romance when I was a teenager. My adult sunflower garden is, as all faerie tales must be, a little more mired in the mundane.

I first planted sunflowers in my garden after a trip to the beautiful Carlsbad flower fields. There as part of a sustainability class we potted tiny sunflower seeds, a kindergarten primer on the joy of growing from seed. Sunflowers come up quick and grow like gangbusters and this little pot of seeds was no exception, pushing up through the soil in less than a week and spreading out strong leaves from its sturdy little stalk. Inspired, I grabbed a packet of random sunflower seeds from the racks at my nursery and carelessly threw them out in an empty patch of bare soil I'd just cultivated. They exploded out of the soil like the fireworks they so resemble, quickly growing to five feet high and unfurling their goldenrod petals like a crown around chocolate-brown centers bursting with seeds. Just like when I was a girl, they thrilled me with their size and their brilliance and their cheerful presence. They became the first place I brought people on my little garden tours.

Hello, my prince.

"Aren't they beautiful?" I gushed to my brother-in-law, inhaling the ambrosial scent of the tomato leaves, hot in the sun, and soaking in the same warmth my flowers were industriously converting into selenium-rich seeds.

"Beautiful," he agreed. "Hope you get some of the seeds. I planted those all over the ranch last year and the birds got every last seed before I could harvest a single one."

What now?

I hadn't thought about the birds. Honestly I hadn't really thought about the seeds, I'd just liked the thought of having sunflowers but suddenly I was determined that no wretched little bastard birds were going to steal my freaking sunflower seeds. I had no idea how to harvest the seeds but if birds could do it I felt sure it couldn't be that hard...like anything about urban farming, how hard could it be?

Sure, professor. Tell me again about the coconut powered tractor slash television slash nuclear reactor we're building. HOW HARD COULD IT BE. 

 A quick web search told me I'd have to wait until the seeds ripened on the heads and the heads dried up enough to easily release the seeds. I went out to my sunflowers. A few of them had nice stripey seeds but they weren't releasing the seeds. A brightly colored yellow finch flew down while I was checking and malevolently watched me from my fence, taunting me with its grinning, tweeting song, a horrible inversion of my Snow White fantasies where the sweetly singing bird companion was actually biding its time to inflict its dark will upon me.

We want. THOSE SEEDS.

Okay, no problem. I'd have to keep the sunflowers on the heads for a few more days, and just...keep the birds away somehow. I draped the flower patch with black bird netting; now my flowers looked like they were getting reading for a Victorian funeral, their cheerful petals were crushed, but at least the seeds were safe. It was just for a few more days. Weeks. Whatever. The leaves, huge and lushly green one day, started browning and dying on the stalk as the seeds ripened, but refused to fall. They hung on the stalks like wrinkled bats dangling in clusters. The petals fell until nothing was left but the seed center, that I'd once idealistically compared to chocolate, to velvet, to the warmth of summer garden soil--now just ugly, dried, and dead. With mounting concern I ran my fingers over the seed heads daily, checking to see if they'd release the seeds. The flowers steadily decayed, no more handsome dancing princes but haggard, hideous crones and still those seed heads refused to give up their bounty.

The birds watched. And waited.

Fear us. We come.

I finally got to the point where I couldn't stand the daily suspense and cut down some of the heads that were mostly ripened as a gardener friend suggested. I bagged the heads in brown grocery bags so the air could still circulate and the heads wouldn't mold while they dried out, and weeks later, the heat in my garage had finally finished drying them to the point that I could shake the heads into the bags and get my seeds.

Once I had the seeds I completely forgot about all the stress of waiting for the seeds to ripen and how ugly the stalks became and the daily stalking by seed-seeking pterodactyls and planted more. 

Damn you, sunflowers. 

This year I added to the seeds I'd propagated from last year to plant sunflowers from The Great Sunflower Project, an organization dedicated to "identifying where pollinators need help, and helping!" I planted "Birds and Bees sunflowers", an heirloom variety with extra pollen for increasingly endangered pollinators like honey bees (and, uncomfortably, for my nemesis, the backyard vultures. Finches. Whatever) and rich, super oily kernels with soft shells. Ignoring completely how I'd hated how ugly the sunflowers got in the backyard I planted them in a raised bed in the front yard; I decided if I planted them thickly they'd support each other's stems and stay looking nice for longer. I put down a thick layer of fresh compost and chicken manure and planted the seeds by the handfuls.

What came up were enormous, gargantuan, monstrous sunflowers. "Birds and Bees" were supposed to grow between 6-8'; the stalks shot up to 8' and kept on going, some reaching 9 and 10 feet. The stalks were thick, several inches in diameter, and the heads were 8" across. They blossomed in extravagant yellow, unfurling their petals like a lady shyly spreading her skirts, first one then the others in quick succession, a procession of blithe and bright-eyed dancers, buoyant in the sun. Every morning I'd find honeybees crawling all over the huge heads, three or four per flower, rare in these bee-starved times. I also saw literal flocks of finches, sparrows and songbirds flying out of the sunflowers every time I went out to water, but I didn't want to cover the heads with unsightly bird netting since they were in the front yard unless I absolutely had to. I tried to tell myself the birds wouldn't get everything and if it started to look like we were losing too many seeds I'd cut the heads like before. The stalks started to die back and look terrible again and since they were ten feet high there was extra room for them to look completely horrible, the most enormous weeds in a giant's abandoned lot. I worried what the neighbors thought. 

"At least we're not the worst yard in the neighborhood," my neighbor the hoarder told me brightly while walking his one-eyed dog. The ancient cocker spaniel leaked goo from her one good eye as they walked back to the dead yard next to the open garage filled to the top with boxes and precariously piled assorted cobwebby junk. 

I can't fault his observations.

Still, I want those seeds. Seed packets are $3 for a handful of seeds, a fraction of what even one seed head can produce. At the end of each sunflower season we have plenty to eat (here's a recipe for roasting salted seeds) and to share with the chickens for feed, with tons left over for replanting. So it's a daily struggle between wanting to cut them all down to keep the yard from looking so gross, and just giving in to absolute chaos and netting and brown bagging the heads right on the stalk. I've taken to pulling the hanging-bat dead leaves off the stems to reduce the amount of brown and mulching them into the beds and trying to just keep the flowers looking somewhat tidy, but the seeds stubbornly remain pure, unripened white even as the stalks deteriorate daily. Every morning I think, well, at least the flowers provided a ton of pollen to sustain the declining honeybee population, maybe that's enough. Maybe I should just take them down today.

Except one of the seed heads turned stripey. I ran my finger over the seed head and the seeds fell gently into my palm, perfectly formed, ready to eat. I cracked one open with my teeth and ate it right there, and threw a handful to my backyard hens. They descended upon the seeds and gobbled them up like gumdrops. I noticed there were some little sunflowers sprouting at the base of the huge stalks, opening their baby yellow cheeks to the sun filtering through the amazon forest of legs.

Hmm. Maybe the neighbors can wait. 

4 Reasons to Plant Sunflowers

Sunflowers for fall? I'm not sure if this is going to work. I mean, of course, there's the whole color palette. Sunflower yellow is really more of a summer color, more suited to gingham and strawberry cotton prints, whereas it's really becoming more of a leggings and Pumpkin Spice Latte moment right now. But in Southern California at least, where winters don't often dip below 50 degrees F (the bottoming out temp for frost tender sunflowers), I have a theory that sunflowers might be a fall option, and I'm planting some now to see if they survive. I've fallen in love with this hardworking flower this spring and summer, so I'll definitely be starting some seedlings in February indoors so they can go out into the garden as early as March, but if I can have a year round dose of these amazing multi-taskers, I'll take it. Here's why sunflowers are my new obsession.

1. Bird Seed. Now I personally like to have birds come swooping into my garden because I like to pretend they are drawn there by my beautiful singing voice and my inherent and visible kindness as a clearly misplaced Disney princess who's been cruelly relocated to the real world. You may enjoy them for the pastoral scene they set when you go out in the morning for your coffee moment and hear them chirping away, or you may just enjoy the sight of brightly colored songbirds with their impossibly brilliant plumage.

This guy, a California oriole, showed up on my fence this year.

For the urban farmer, though, the birds are essential, both as pollinators (especially for large flowers like sunflowers) and for the bugs they eat. Yes, birds can be a nuisance when it comes to tasty little sprouts and berry bushes, but it's worth the hassle of covering certain plants in bird netting to have them present in the garden to eat things like tomato hornworms and cabbage loopers and the general abundance of caterpillars that turn into moths and other pests. Though I don't allow birds to just free range my entire sunflower garden, I do leave one or two sunflowers to go to seed where the birds can easily access them, and I also scatter a handful of seeds on the ground. Particularly in winter food sources can be scarce for birds and protein-rich sunflower seeds and the perfect little pick me up to keep them pecking around in the garden long enough to earn their keep by gobbling up some pests. 

2. Bees. Scientists haven't come up with a definitive answer yet on what is causing the catastrophic Colony Collapse Disorder that has devastated American beehives since 1997. Over ten million beehives have been lost due to CCD, worker bees disappearing from the hive despite an abundance of food and leaving the queen with just a few nurse bees to care for the young. The effects are potentially devastating to us humans as well since most food crops need to be pollinated in some way before they can fruit. It's serious enough that the federal government has enacted a White House Task Force on Pollinator Health to reduce the amount of beehives being lost to CCD and restore and enhance millions of acres of land for pollinators like the honey bee and monarch butterfly. The President has asked all citizens to help by planting pollinator gardens or setting aside land to go wild. Organizations like The Great Sunflower Project are trying to help educate and promote the use of sunflowers for pollinator gardens since sunflowers, by virtue of their bright yellow color, are especially attractive to bees and particularly rich in abundant pollen. Additionally, by letting some of the stems remain standing after the flowers are spent, you can provide hollow tubes for wild bees to lay their eggs. 

Sunflower "Lemon Queen"--particularly attractive to bees (notice pollen all over the leaves) and recommended by the Great Sunflower Project

Any sunflower seed will do as long you check to see that it is not a pollen free varietal (developed for florist arrangements) but The Great Sunflower Project particularly promotes the "Lemon Queen", a relatively small 4"-5" head, 5'-6' feet in height, with more than average pollen production. You can find the seeds right at the checkout counter at Whole Foods or in most nursery seed racks, or find them at Burpee Seeds or my personal favorite, Renee's Garden Seeds.

3. Attracting pollinators. The flowers are gorgeous, of course, and so cheerful, but the petals aren't just decorative and nor is the yellow color coincidental. Not only are sunflowers benefiting the pollinators themselves but the fact that they draw these beneficial insects and birds to the garden helps the entire garden ecosystem. Bees that come for the sunflower pollen will also pause to pollinate your squash blossoms and blueberry flowers. The huge yellow sunflower heads are like a big neon truck-stop beacon shouting "Food, Next Exit!" Not only do bees love the bright yellow color but all kinds of butterflies, including the struggling populations of migratory Monarchs, are attracted as well. I wish I'd put some sunflowers in next to my Butternut squashes this spring; the gourds flowered with some brilliant yellow blossoms but never fruited from lack of pollinating. Blah.

4. The Seeds!

A handful of sunflower seeds thrown into the ground under 1/2" of cover soil yielded about six heads and this bowl of seeds, enough that I have plenty for replanting even after I scattered some to the wild birds, fed handfuls to my chickens, and roasted a batch with salt. Click here for the recipe. Sunflower seeds are delicious but more than that, they just might be the perfect snack for keeping yourself beautiful. Don't believe me? A comparison of sunflower kernels to some other beauty-magazine-lauded nuts and berries (here) lists sunflower seeds as extraordinarily rich in selenium, iron, zinc (all of which combat thyroid problems that lead to lowered metabolisms and hair loss) and vitamin E (keeps your skin healthy and plumped). Did I already mention delicious? They're delicious.

Sunflowers take almost no care except a sunny spot and a bit of water to thrive (nothing like what your lawn full of emotionally manipulative grass, with its empty promises of softly caressing green abundance but in actuality scratchy, itchy blades of lies that would only save you from starvation if they could also give you crippling belly cramps and would just as soon burn your house to the ground as look at you). Each seed that flowers yields hundreds. HUNDREDS. Of seeds. I am kicking myself for not throwing down pounds of the stuff during prime time sunflower planting season in March. Once my sunflowers' petals had started fading and the seeds had formed, I went ahead and snipped off the top 12" of stem and flower head, bagging the heads in brown paper lunch bags and hanging them upside down. They dried in about six weeks and the seeds were easy to just brush off with a fingertip. 

Hopefully my fall sunflower experiment will yield some blossoms for me; but if not, I can't think of a better plant for an early spring container garden and some experiments in succession planting, where you plant a crop of the same seeds every two weeks to end up with flowers throughout the spring and summer. A flower that feeds everything in the garden, as statuesque and slender as a Roman goddess, turning her face to the sun to follow the passage of Helios' flaming chariot across the sky, definitely deserves to be the focus of Farming in Heels.