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One of the showiest outdoor plants you can cultivate at your Salt Lake City home is the sunflower. Sunflowers are best planted in late spring, so there’s still time! Millcreek Gardens carries a wide variety of outdoor plants, houseplants and seeds for your growing and cultivating pleasure.
Most outdoor plants will do better if you follow directions about when to plant, spacing, watering, thinning, etc. But some are likely grow even if you get busy and forget about them, and sunflowers are some of these plants.
Two things sunflowers can’t do without are sunshine and water (just like us!), so make sure you choose a nice sunny spot for your sunflowers and water them liberally.
Sunflowers do best in well-drained soil, so the sandy soil we have here in Utah is perfect. If you’re just starting a garden at your Salt Lake City home and need some nursery soil, Millcreek Gardens is the place to get it. Just tell us what you’re planting, and we’ll point you in the right direction.
One of the greatest challenges of growing sunflowers is preventing the squirrels from stealing your seeds before they germinate. Sometimes it seems as if squirrels sit in trees, watching you plant sunflower seeds, chuckling to themselves at your foolishness, and then run and dig them up and eat them as soon as you go back in the house.
Since controlling the squirrel population would be hard, we recommend planting twice as many sunflowers as you would like to grow.
One of the most satisfying parts of planting sunflowers is how fast and big they grow. The giant variety can grow up to 14 feet tall, their stems becoming heavy, woody stalks.
That’s important, because sunflowers need the strength to hold up their blossoms, which can get to be more than 2 feet wide. These beauties turn their faces to the sun, tracking it through the sky all day long. If you drive through a field of sunflowers, you’ll notice they face one way in the morning and the other way in the afternoon.
Their bright yellow color is cheerful and uplifting — your sunflowers will be an inspiring sight to behold every evening when you return home from work.
You can harvest the seeds from your sunflowers, roast them and eat them. Add your roasted sunflower seeds to granola, breads, muffins and even burgers. Sprinkle them atop vegetables, or just eat them straight from the bag.
Depending on how many sunflowers you get, you might not be able to eat all the seeds. Don’t worry! Birds, mice, chipmunks, squirrels and even bears love sunflower seeds, though you may not see many of the latter in Salt Lake City.
June is prime flower planting month in Utah. For outdoor plants, great advice, friendly service and sunflower seeds, come to Millcreek Gardens, Salt Lake City’s favorite gardening store.