Facts About Sunflower Plants for Kids

If you want a plant to grow that's practically guaranteed for success, try a sunflower (Helianthus annuus). Its seeds are large and easy to plant, and they sprout in about a week. They grow quickly to one of the tallest plants in the garden and reward you with bright, large, cheerful flowers. Its many varieties allow a choice of sunflowers to grow for seeds to snack on, nutritious food for birds or colorful red, yellow, orange, pink and purplish flowers for visual appeal.

Sunflowers are one of the few garden plants that is totally North American. Cultivated by native North American peoples as long as 5,000 years ago, sunflower seed kernels furnished flour for bread, mush and cakes, and people ate the seed kernels whole. Dark-seeded varieties provide a dye for decorating household items and textiles and for ceremonial body painting.

Oilseed sunflowers produce smaller, black seeds than the larger, gray and white striped nonoilseed type usually grown for snack foods. If you want to feed birds, choose an oilseed variety, which gives birds better nutrition than nonoilseed sunflowers.

Sunflowers can grow 6 feet tall in three months under favorable growing conditions. Some sunflower varieties, such as "Sunzilla," grow to be 16 feet tall in one season. Other varieties regularly reach 10 to 15 feet high, including "Kong," "Paul Bunyan" and "Mammoth Russian." According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the tallest sunflower grew 28 feet 8 inches tall in Kaarst, Germany, in August 2013.

The part of sunflower you eat is the soft kernel inside the seed. It has 19 percent protein, high for a plant food. Kernels also contain 36 percent of the average daily value for fats, 76 percent of the daily value for Vitamin E and significant amounts of six B vitamins. Besides that, they taste great.

Sunflower heads look like one giant flower, but they're actually made up of hundreds of smaller flowers. In the middle is a central disk of many small, tubular flowers that produce the seeds. Outer ray flowers surround the disk with petals that project outward like sun rays.

For an eye-catching, cuddly-looking flower, try the sunflower variety "Teddy Bear," which features shaggy-looking double flowers of narrow ray flowers. They're 6 inches wide and on dwarf plants 2 1/2 to 3 feet tall. They're good as cut flowers as well as garden ornamentals.

Plant sunflowers in a sunny spot in the garden after all danger of frost has passed. Spread a 2-inch layer of aged compost or aged manure on the garden soil and dig it in. Sow sunflower seeds 1 to 2 inches deep and 6 inches apart in full sun. Sunflowers tolerate many soil types but prefer good drainage. Water the seeded area; seedlings usually emerge in seven to 10 days.

When two sets of true leaves show above the seed leaves, thin the seedlings to 2 feet apart. Keep seedlings evenly moist and water them once a week with fish emulsion. To make the fish emulsion solution, mix 6 tablespoons of fish emulsion in 1 gallon of water. Soak the root area thoroughly. As plants mature, water them thoroughly when the top 1 to 2 inches of soil is dry, especially when flowers and seeds are forming, about 20 days before and after flowering.