Planting Sunflowers

A fun and fail-safe way to make your garden a stopping station for seed-eating birds is to plant sunflowers. Planting sunflowers is, literally, child’s play. The seeds are big enough for little hands to maneuver into the ground, and when the plants bloom approximately 60 days later … wow! Plant them in straight formation, as a summer screen, or in a circle to create a private fort for children. Use them as climbing props for flowering vines, or space them 3 or 4 inches apart in a row so they stretch for light and give you armloads of long-stemmed flowers. However you use them, try hard to resist the urge to “neaten up” the garden in late summer. You’ll get another season of interest as the birds do acrobatics to dislodge the tightly packed, nutritious seeds.

Check out the hundreds of varieties available. You’ll find dwarfs and giants, branching reds and single-stemmed oranges, multiple small flowers and humongous heads. You’ll also find pollenless sunflowers. Choose whatever turns you on—some say the pollenless types make better cut flowers, and even they will make seeds if other sunflowers with pollen grow nearby. One word of advice: For bird-feeding purposes, the wilder, branching types are more generous and last longer in the garden than the once-and-done single-stemmed varieties.

Other seed-producing flowers that birds like to pick at (if you let the flower stalks stand through the winter, that is) include black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower, cosmos, aster, and ‘Purple Majesty’ millet. A limited selection of seeds is generally available from retail seed racks. Some mail-order sources, such as Johnny’s Selected Seeds, have sunflowers in dozens of colors and sizes, as well as a good selection of other bird favorites. www.johnnyseeds.com