nscochrane1009
Spike
So myself and a few of my club members have tried planting sugar beets and sunflowers this past couple seasons to no real avail. Does anybody else plant these and have success? If you do, do you have an advice?
I tried sugar beets this fall & don’t think any of them came up, so I won’t do that again. Sunflowers are usually pretty easy to grow, so maybe the location you’re planting them in isn’t getting enough sunlight for them to germinate & thrive? I plant mine in tilled ground with either a hand pushed Earthway garden seeder or a JD 71 planter with soybean plates. They can be planted from 1/2” to 2” deep & come up. Plant them from April through July depending on when you want them to mature, which is about 90 days. I often just buy a bag of sunflower seeds from the dog food aisle in the grocery store or the bird seed section at Lowe’s/AgriSupply & throw it in the planter hopper with peas or beans. The only other thing I can think of, and I don’t want to insult your intelligence, but they have to be raw, not roasted seeds. A bag of David sunflower seeds is not going to germinate because the roasting process kills the seed. Any raw seed that you buy for birds should work almost as well as seeds from a catalog. Lastly, they are very sensitive to 2,4D and dicamba herbicides so if there are ag fields nearby that may be an issue. Very few broadleaf herbicides are labeled for use over the top of sunflowers so mechanical weed control is about your only option. No such thing as a roundup ready sunflower either.