Sunflowers are so fun. They bring the bees, turn towards the light, and grow so easy from seed. The orange hued petals are most common, but one of my favorites is the lemonade sunflower series. They’re huge and doubled petal. Harvest a bunch of these flowers creates a beautiful en masse bouquet of sunshine for a home.
Lemonade Sunflower Seeds
My favorite place to buy flower seeds is from Johnny’s Select Seeds. You may be able to find this variety elsewhere as well. Just a heads up that Johnny’s does not offer free shipping until $200 order is created.
When I planted these in 2023, I laid down landscape fabric with burnt holes spaced 18-inches apart, then placed the seeds to push down 1/2-inch. With the early drought in 2023 with heat waves and the smoke from Canada, I waited until we did have some rain to plant the seeds.
Lemonade Sunflowers are a branching variety, not a single-stem variety. One sunflower plant produced multiple after multiple stems, although shorter. I saw other branching varieties of sunflowers operate as single-stem for how close they were planted together. For the upcoming season, I plan to do both the large spacing and the close spacing to see the difference.
Landscape Fabric with Branching Sunflowers
Landscape fabric is great at retaining moisture in the soil, as well as keeping those pesty weeds away. It does have a downfall when planting branching sunflower varieties, like Lemonade, in its burnt holes. Branching sunflowers have huge bases. Huge. After cutting the stems with the bloom off the stalk, the tall sunflower stalk is still there. And it can’t just be pulled out. You can try, but good luck!
It takes cutting down the sunflower stalk so low in every location to then lift up the landscape fabric overtop of the shortened stalks. If any stalks can come out before this, I try my hardest, but the sunflower roots although not super deep, they do spread out and keep a grasp of the soil, even when the stalk has died off.
I’d give up on using landscape fabric with these sunflowers, but I keep going because I really don’t want weeds at the base of these plants. Ha! I’ll take anything besides weeds.
Harvesting Lemonade Sunflower
With planting these in late May or early June, I had a harvest near the second week of September. I tried to create the longest stems by cutting near where the stem connects to the stalk, and in some sunflowers, I cut off the top 18-inches of the plant. This gave me multiple blooms per stem. This wouldn’t be ideal for design work, but it was doable for a home bouquet.
Anytime harvesting sunflowers, watch out for the bees. Bubble bees and honey bees all love these sunny blooms. In late summer, I kept getting stung while moving sunflowers into buckets or when harvesting, so do be careful. The more sunflowers you plant, the more bees will be in your garden.
Lemonade Sunflowers
I think these are my favorite sunflower! FAVORITE! My favorite color is yellow, and these blooms are the hue of lemonade, maybe a bit brighter and more saturated.
The petals are doubled. Layers upon layers of miniature sunflower petals opening up from the center where the colors transform from a lime green to the bright yellow.
My ultimate favorite flower is the peony, but I like to think of lemonade sunflowers as the peony of the sunflowers. It even reminds me of large dinner-plate dahlias with their layers of hundreds of petals and just being HUGE.
Lemonade Sunflower Bouquet
Keeping it simple with these trial sunflowers, I harvested the blooms, and then took them inside to arrange in a very large, sturdy vase. The vase was the tallest I had, which I usually reserve for gladiolus bouquets. The thickness of the glass is about 4-times more than an average vase.
Arranging wasn’t much since all the blooms were the same, yet I wanted to make sure a circular, dome shape was formed and the flower blooms faced outwards at all angles. Even the stems in the center were aimed outwards, tucked behind the blooms on the exterior of the arrangement.
Not all the blooms were the massize ones, but it created a unique dynamic with small sunflowers mixed with larger ones.
I left some of the upper leaves on the stems to add some greenery to the arrangement tucked away showing just a little under the blooms.
Vase Life
These sunnies lasted a little over a week. Flower preservative were given at the beginning. But my biggest struggle with them was how much water they drank. Early September in 2023 was still relatively warm for late summer. Inside the house it was still hot. That added onto the fact that these flowers just need lots of hydration, the water ran out before I knew it.
Once I realized this, it took adding water EVERY day. Some of the blooms lasted longer, but I started to get rid of some of the stems and blooms when they started to turn a murky brown in the petals.
Joy of Lemonade Sunflowers
This has been one of my favorite bouquets for the 2023 season. With my personality traits, I LOVE trying something new. Love it! When these lemonade sunflowers bloomed, I couldn’t believe of their beauty. I always say I’m not the sunflower fanatic. I went into flower farming growing sunflowers, but not obsessed with them. Now, peonies, am I obsessed? Yes. Definitely 100%. If something has a peony on it, I’m buying it. I know some people are that way with sunflowers.
Sunflowers for me, the love is in the garden with them. They are now one of my favorite flowers in the garden and for harvest. These non-standard varieties are the bomb. They are gorgeous and are forever sweet to my heart. Lemonade sunflowers with their yellow blooms and massive quantity of petals are absolutely beautiful!
