Growing Sunflower in Terrace Garden

I started growing flowering plants to increase pollination for all the vegetable plants. Initially I started only with vegetables but most of the time the plants would flower but not grow into vegetable or fruit. I started reading on how to increase the vegetable produce and most of the articles mentioned that it was due to lack of pollination. So I started out with hand pollination and succeeded in few like tomatoes, chillies and beans. But I couldn’t do hand pollination all the time and for that we would need the help of bees and butterflies, so I potted more flowering plants to attract bees and butterflies. Started out with roses, then fell in love with the bright colours of petunias and wishbone flowers to rain Lillies and calendulas. I have always had sunflower seeds to feed the cockatiels at home and it didn’t strike me until I bought a big pot to have a mini flower garden in centre of the terrace. I was thinking for few days on what could be grown and decided to have bright colour flowers. When I was feeding the cockatiels I thought maybe I should try with sunflowers to see if they could grow and it would be beautiful in the middle of the garden and it did turned out to grow beautifully. Here is the week by week growth of how sunflowers blooms into bright little ones 🙂

Week 1 – The seeds starts germinating and starts its growth in the first week. The seedling comes out and the first set of leaves grows out.

Week 2 – The plant grows almost by 3-4 inches in height. They have alternate leaf formation and in 2 weeks you will see the leaves are growing tremendously.

Week 3 – The plant grows faster in the 3rd week. From 3-4 inches the plant almost doubles in height and it was almost half my height in 3 weeks.

Week 4 – By this time the plant would have grown fully and would measure at least 4-5 feet tall. You could see small flowers coming out from each plant by end of week 4.

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Week 5 – The flower starts to grows bigger and by end of week 5 they will start flaming out and each flower will look like a small ball of fire. This is when they are ready to open up.

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Week 6 – By week 6, the flowers will start opening up slowly. Unlike other flowering plant where the flowers open up in one day, this will take at least 3-4 days for the flower to fully open up. On Day 1, only few petals open, second day few more and by 3rd or 4th day the entire flower open up and you could see this bright yellow flower happily dancing in the pot. If you have more than one plant, you will see all plants blooming between 6 to 7 weeks. After week 7, once the flower is all pollinated the flowers will mature and produce seeds.

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I added manure once a month which is a mix of compost and cow dung. Sunflowers should be watered regularly, even if you skip for a day they would start withering soon. So make sure to water them regularly. Sunflower does take a minimum of 2 months from the seeds to start germinating till the flowers open up. But it was worth the wait to see these bright ones dance in the wind once they open up. It’s a fun plant to grow and they definitely attract a lot of bees and butterflies 🙂