Clear a patch of soil that is sunny all day. Dig in some compost or Yates Dynamic Lifter Organic Plant Food. Sow your seeds, cover with soil and water thoroughly. Keep the soil damp while you wait for your seeds to germinate. This will take a week to ten days. Once your seedlings are about 5cm tall cover the soil around them with mulch, such as wood chip or straw.
Choose dwarf sunflower seeds (such as Yates 'Little Ted') and a pot that is at least 20cm wide and deep. Place it in a sheltered spot with full sun and fill with potting mix, such as Yates Premium Potting Mix. Plant your seed, cover and water in well.
Once flower buds start to form, feed your sunflower plants with Yates Thrive Rose & Flower Food. Count the days from seed sowing till flowering. See whose sunflower grows the faster or the tallest. Measure your sunflower as it grows and make a note to compare with your friends. Or make a graph to show how much your sunflower grew each day.
TIP: If you want to start you sunflowers indoors for planting in the garden later, sow seeds in biodegradable pots (you can make these from empty toilet rolls or newspaper) sothey can be planted in the garden, pot-and-all, without disturbing their roots.Just be sure to keep the soil moist so they don’t dry out on hot summer days.
Look really closely at your sunflower and you can see that it is actually hundreds (maybe more than a thousand) of little flowers all joined together to make one clever bit of nature called an inflorescence. Each tiny flower is called a floret.
And there is not just one kind of floret! Around the outside of the sunflowers are the pretty yellow ray florets. The circle in the middle of the sunflower is filled with disc florets.
Ray florets don’t make seeds. The disc florets have both male and female parts and will grow the seeds once the bees have done their work. Watch how the disc florets open on the outside of the circle first. Why might this be? Which florets might have the most nectar and pollen?
You might want to dissect a sunflower with your class and look even more closely at the florets through a microscope. Which type of florets are symmetrical?
Adorable 'Little Ted' is a bushy, short-growing sunflower with super fluffy pompom flowers. It doesn’t take up much space, and grows really well in a pot. The happy golden-yellow flowers look amazing in a vase, and last for ages.
Interesting…You might be wondering how Little Ted sunflowers grow seeds, since they don’t have a large disc. They have ‘ligulate’ florets, which are yellow like ray florets but have both male and female parts so they can make seeds.
Sunflowers belong to the Asteraceae, the world’s biggest plant family. Their cousins include cosmos, daisies, zinnias, dandelions and many many more. They all have a similar look about them! Take a walk around your neighbourhood and see how many different Asteraceae flowers you can recognise.
