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Hi everyone. yes, i'm worried. I'm in the process of trying to brighten up my first floor east facing balcony by growing sunflowers.
They have reached about 10-11 inches, but their lower leaves have started to wilt. I recently repotted them to give them some space. Is it normal for this to happen as they grow? I'm new to this site and a novice gardener, so any feedback would be a great help. Thanks!

Yes, these are the seed leaves, tall growing plants will always shed lower leaves as the enrgy goes up the plant, you will find this more with tall growers, such as sunflowers and tomatoes. Just pick off the leaves if there are ones above.

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Best wishes
Andrewo
Harbinger of Rhubarb tales

Hello Larry, yes I think its quite normal for sunflowers to loose their bottom leaves. I hope they will get enough sun on an east facing balcony. If light proves to be a problem for you Bizzy Lizies and Begonia Semperflorens will do well in poor light conditions. I would buy them in as they are so slow to germinate. Good luck with the balcony.

thanks andrewo. i was worried that my first crop were slowly dying. It all makes sense now, the upper leaves are as fit as anything. cheers!

Alice, thanks for the plant advice. It is a bit of a problem with this east facing balcony. the sun dissappears completely at around 12 o' clock and being on the first floor of a high rise it is also incredibly windy. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how the sunflowers develop! I'm praying for glorious mornings! (as yet, unanswered). Regards.

what height are you expecting them to grow to? You may need to fasten them to something for support!!

Nicos, at the moment i'm just loving how quick they grow. i'm hoping they're get to a resonable size. i have already supported them just incase, due to the high winds, but they're such strong fellows, they don't as yet probably need it.

We grew them on the allotment last year for the first time, and the 10ft + ones had stems about 2.5 ins wide! Were a bugger to chop up and try and burn and then, too late, realised they would have been great to use as supports this year!! doh...

nicos, what a good idea!! the other thing, if you've got kids, is to let them take one of the heads in to school and then the class can grow sunflowers plants from the seeds... or you can just leave them for the birds of course! question: why dont sunflowers self seed then?

They do!!....but not at all well.
Last year we grew about 30 plants, some of them multiheaded and at this moment have 8 seedlings self seeded!!! If you think about how many seeds that lot produced, bearing in mind that half the flowers were picked and brought home, it's a pretty poor rate of self seeding!
There were loads of seeds in the compost so I think the local wildlife had stored a lot for winter.

another sunflower question?is it possible to dry my sunflower heads to eat the seeds,i have tall multi headed yellow ones and some smaller purple ones?have never tried to do this before/

When I was young we grew 4 massive sunflowers (the standard 1 flowered huge ones!). We dried one of the heads and ate the sunflower seeds - very tasty and quite fun too!

we have a sunflower that we didn't plant! must've been a seed dropped by a passing bird I think - anyway, its done better than any of the ones we actually planted and is now 220cm tall!

if we want to use the seeds for eating do we need to roast them or anything?

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smiling is infectious....

http://www.thehudsonallotment.blogspot.com/ updated 28th May 2008

I think roasting them helps them to keep longer, but you don't need to to it. See what you think of them raw... and see if you think you'll scoff them all pretty quick or want to save them!

I'm pretty certain that we just ate them as they were from the plant and didn't roast them. That's what I'll try this year anyway!

Forgot to say... I had a look on google for roasting tips.... so if you do want to roast them, you heat the oven up to 275 C and roast them on a baking tray for approx 10 minutes. Just make sure you don't let them get too dark.

Enjoy...!