Sunflowers or Helianthus is the most popular summer flower. It is both a beautiful flower and a great vegetable! Healthy, nutritious and attractive, Sunflowers have it all. Sunflowers are used to attract birds to our homes. We also enjoy eating the seeds. They are high in protein. Sunflowers are popular as a cooking oil, too.

Appearance of a sunflower

The sunflower has a tall and thick stem crowned by what seems like a single giant flower. Interestingly, this flower is no flower at all but a constellation made up of hundreds of small flowers called the head. The brown center of the flower is the constellation of flowers, with the yellow leaves acting more as a protect ant to the flowers during the flowering and seed development phases.

How to plant sunflowers ?

- Plant your sunflower seeds between May 15 and July 1. Make sure soil temperatures are above 50 degrees F. The soil should be well-drained, but can range from sand to clay.
- Dig holes that are 1 to 2 inches deep in rows. Planting in rows will allow for good cultivation.
- Use a drill or corn planter.
- Put in a well-balanced fertilizer mixture. Add 50 pounds of phosphorus, 100 pounds of potassium and less than 100 pounds of nitrogen.
- Make sure to cover your seedlings after you add the fertilizer.

Care to take while growing sunflowers

- Plant sunflowers where they receive sun the whole day.
- Water frequently, but make sure not to over-water as this will hurt your sunflowers. Leaving them with too little water will harm them as well.
- Watch for sclerotina disease, which is a white mold. Recognize white mold by spotting rotting sunflower heads and stalks. Look for other disease such as rust and downy mildew.
- Put in a stake if your sunflower is having trouble standing on its own.

Soil Best for Growing Sunflower Seeds

- Sunflowers will thrive in a wide range of soil types. You can plant in sandy soil or in clay and have reasonable expectations of success either way.
- Don’t plant them in wet, swampy soils, and make sure any planting containers have adequate drainage.
- Sunflowers require medium to high levels of nitrogen in the soil, as they are somewhat inefficient users of that macro-nutrient. If you grow sunflowers in the same spot every year, you will need to enhance the soil with compost or fertilizer each time you plant.
- Sunflowers are rated as having low salt tolerance. They do not like saline environment.

Life Cycle of a Sunflower

- First you plant a seed.
- The root starts to pop out of the seed.
- The root starts to grow.
- The root hair begins to form and anchor the plant in the ground.
- The shoot begins to pop out and head in the opposite direction of the root.
- Eventually the shoot breaks through the soil.
- The shoot begins to grow in a sprout.
- The sprout starts to grow leaves.
- A bud starts to form.
- The bud starts to bloom. Petals and a flower head are formed.
- Seeds and pollen are on the flower head.
- The petals began to fall off and the flower begins to die.
- The seeds fall to the ground and the cycle starts again.

Soil preparation is critical if you are going in for organic farming. You do not have the liberty of adding a load of chemical fertilizers later if you find some deficiencies in the soil; and the motto for organic farming remains, “do adequate preparation rather than react later”.
Making sure that the soil is healthy is an important first step in the preparation for organic farming. If the soil used for organic farming was earlier used for commercial farming, then you need to spend time to ensure that the presense of chemical fertilizers and pesticides have been removed from the soil (how to do this is a separate post), the duration for which you need to have kept such soil clean before using it for organic farming depends on the organic gardening certification in your country or state, and you should check those regulations.
The steps that you should take in order to get your soil ready are:
- Make sure that there are no weeds, stones, or pieces of other debris in the soil, and that it is ready for next steps
- Do a soil analysis. You can get a proper soil analysis done, or you can look at the rough ways of estimating the quality and breakup of your soil. Soil should have 3 main components (sand – 40%, silt 40%, and clay 20%). The soil should be one that you can compress with your hand, and it forms a solid mass that breaks when you poke it. If it either is unable to form a solid mass, or does not crumble when you apply effort, then the soil either has too much sand, or too much clay. An imbalance can result in the soil not being optimum, with imapct on water logging, or the ability of soil to let plants grow in it.
- You can also take a sample of your soil, put it in a glass beaker or jug of water, and then shake, and then let the soil settle down. The settling inside the glass leaves you with 3 different layers, of sand, silt and clay (with clay on top). The levels of each will slowly start giving you an idea of what is missing, and then you can add more of the missing element to get a better mixture. of course, if you are not able to get a correct mixture, go to the store and ask them for the amount of soil you require (make sure that you specify that you are going to grow organically)
- Look to see how you can encourage the growth of healthy stuff such as microbes, earthworms, etc. They do a lot to make your soil better.
- Read up about the various fertilizers you can add to your soil to make up for deficiencies. This would mean that you need to find out what your soil is missing, and requires some amount of knowledge (or if you don’t have knowledge, either learn, or get somebody who can advise). Be sure that adding some good compost is typically helpful for the soil.
- Learn about crop rotation, so that you plan ahead for the crops you are going to put in the soil, and learn about which plants add which element, and remove which nutrient from the soil. Doing this is essential if you want to make sure that you soil is good in terms of nutrients, not only now, but for the future.
- Soil is improved when you add organic matter to the soil. This means that you should items such as compost, and even some more strange items such as hair (for nitrogen), grass clippings, purchased organic fertilizer, peat moss
- If you can, enable poultry to have free access to your soil. Hens do a fair amount of the manual hard work required, such as removing weeds, adding manure, and undertaking tilling of the soil.

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The previous article was about growing tomatoes in containers. But suppose you have the space to grow tomatoes in soil, and want to figure out what all you need to do to get a healthy output. There is plenty of information that would help you in this process; after all, you need to know about which types of tomatoes, what are the pests and blights that could affect your plants, what is the best type of soil, what is the amount of watering and sunlight that should be given to the plants, and so on. Further, if you get tips and points that you should avoid doing, those will help you a lot. Here is the link to an article that should help you in this regard:

# Good first-time growers’ varieties include Better Boy, Creole, Big Boy, Early Girl, Brandywine, Celebrity, Lemon Boy, or just about any cherry or grape tomato variety.
# Plant several varieties rather than all of one type– this ensures a steady harvest. As a rule of thumb, it’s good to have two plants for each member of the family who will eat tomatoes. If you plan on canning or making salsa, use up to four plants per person.
# Prepare the garden bed by adding lots of compost (5 to 8 pounds per square foot/25 to 40 kilograms per square meter) to the soil. Turn compost into the top 3 inches (6 to 8 cm). Tomatoes demand a growing medium rich in organic matter. If you don’t make your own compost, use store-bought compost or composted manure available in the 40-pound bags. Compost or Manure is usually less than US$5 per 40-pound bag.

The referred article provides help from the process of selecting the tomato plant / seed, and then goes onto providing an estimate of how many plants you should have. You learn about the tomato spacing, watering, providing fertilizer, support for the growing plant, when to pick the tomato, warnings and things to avoid, etc.

So you went ahead and decided to grow tomatoes, having been allured by the thought of growing some beautiful tomatoes that you can admire while they are growing, and then enjoy in your kitchen – there is a different sort of feeling that you get when growing your own food, especially something as attractive as a tomato.
And then disaster; the tomato is struck by pests, or by some sort of blight, or does not grow at all. And then you need to go looking for help, for somebody to tell you what can be the problem. So, here is a link to a resource that should be able to help you grow your tomatoes better.
It is a short guide, but one that tells you about the basics of growing tomatoes, as well as why tomatoes can get sick. You also get to know about organic treatments for some of these problems. In the end, you get a listing of disease resistant tomato varieties, and also a listing of the favorite varieties of the tomato. Here’s the link to the article:

If you’re new to tomato gardening, you should note that the key to avoiding problems with your tomatoes is to grow them under the healthiest conditions possible. This involves proper watering, sunlight, air circulation, and good quality soil with plenty of organic material mixed in. There are also a variety of organic fertilizers out there to give your tomatoes an extra advantage.
Tomatoes can suffer attacks by bugs, fungi, viruses, or bacteria. Tomatoes also suffer stress due to environmental conditions such as excessive cold, heat, sunlight or moisture. Some problems are associated with deficiencies in certain nutrients. Tomatoes can pick up diseases through contaminated soil, the air, through rain or irrigation water that carry fungal spores, or through insects that carry a disease.