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gardening for beginners

How to use dry sunflower stalks in my soil?

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posted 8 months ago

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I need to build my soil. I have a lot of old dry sunflower stalks.

What is the best way to use the stalks?

Should I run them over with a lawn mower to mulch? This turns them into powder.

Should chop them into small pieces and mix them with the soil? If so, how long? A foot long? An inch long?

What about the dried sunflower heads? Okay to put those in the soil?

Anne Miller

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posted 8 months ago

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Why not make a hugelkultur bed with them?

Yes, put dried sunflower heads in the soil as you might get more pretty sunflowers.

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Jay Angler

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posted 8 months ago

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Sunflower stalks will add carbon to your soil. Many areas of North American have lost a lot of carbon from their soil due to too much tillage. So I try not to dig my soil too much, but sometimes I need to so that good stuff goes where I want it. It's a balance.

Walter Byrd wrote:Should I run them over with a lawn mower to mulch? This turns them into powder.

I would worry you would loose a lot to it blowing away. Powdering a little of it to add to potting soil would be different.

Should chop them into small pieces and mix them with the soil? If so, how long? A foot long? An inch long?

I would try a foot give or take. I would dig as narrow a trench as possible, lay the stalk down in it, then cover it back over sort of like if you were planting a potato.

Have you visited our biochar forum? ( https://permies.com/f/190/biochar ) If you can get a lot of sunflower stalks, making biochar, activating it with compost tea + pee, and mixing it into your soil could really help with soil building.

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William Bronson

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posted 8 months ago

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Great resource you have there!
I put my most substantial biomass in the base of my beds, and top my beds with the stuff that breaks down easily.

If you have established beds you want to amend, I would use the mower to pulverize the stalks, and top your beds with that material.
I would add some nitrogen to that, alfalfa meal, urine, grass or such.
If you can chip the stalks to chunks, I would use that on top of the pulverized stuff.

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Doug McEvers

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posted 8 months ago

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FYI, The sunflower stover should be a good soil builder but is high in carbon. The carbon to nitrogen ratio is important in understanding how quickly or not residues break down.

AI Overview
The Carbon-to-Nitrogen Ratio: A Key Factor in Plant Health ...
The carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio of sunflower stover typically falls in the range of 30:1 to 60:1, often cited around 40:1 to 50:1 depending on the maturity of the plant. This high ratio indicates it is a "brown" material that decomposes slowly and may cause temporary nitrogen immobilization (microbes consuming soil nitrogen to break down the carbon).

https://eupdate.agronomy.ksu.edu/article/crop-residue-decomposition-and-nutrient-release-rates-442#:~:text=What%20determines%20how%20and%20when,N%20will%20be%20tied%20up.

Christopher Weeks

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posted 8 months ago

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I knock the stalks over and then step on them to break them up a bit and just use that as mulch.

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Joao Winckler

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posted 8 months ago

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I just stomp mine flat and leave them as mulch, they break down over a season or two. The heads I chuck straight on the beds, sometimes get a few volunteer sunflowers which is never a bad thing.

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Tereza Okava

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i let the rabbits eat the leaves and run the remaining stalks through the chipper, use as mulch or in compost.

Jay Angler

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Tereza Okava wrote:I let the rabbits eat the leaves and ...

... and then use the rabbit poop to improve your soil?

Sorry Tereza. There are reasons I don't raise rabbits, but I've heard amazing things about their poop.

I do raise chickens, and I got my first ones for a really shitty reason... their manure for my garden.

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Tereza Okava

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Jay Angler wrote:use the rabbit poop to improve your soil?

You betcha!! Best thing I've used so far (going to pick up 2 more new "employees" tomorrow, in fact.

Walter Byrd

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posted 8 months ago

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Anne Miller wrote:Why not make a hugelkultur bed with them?

Yes, put dried sunflower heads in the soil as you might get more pretty sunflowers.

How much time would it take for this to help the soil? I would think it would be years.

Matt McSpadden

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posted 8 months ago

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Hi Walter,
How fast things break down will depend on your climate and how big of pieces you use. This is true of putting it on top, or building a wood core or hügelkultur mound.

A wet climate, it will break down faster, and smaller pieces will break down faster. I don't have any experience in how fast it would break down truly buried, but I put a bunch of sunflower stalks in a cold compost pile (just layered and let it sit), and when I came back a year later... I couldn't see any pieces.

The benefits will last for years, even after it appears to be completely broken down.

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Anne Miller

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Christopher Weeks wrote:I knock the stalks over and then step on them to break them up a bit and just use that as mulch.

This is what we did the year we grew sunflowers.

Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
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Dennis Barrow

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I have a light weight chipper that only does up to 2.5 inches.
Sunflower stalks and corn stalks go through it in the fall. (I only get three 5 gallon buckets full). I add the results to raised beds, in ground beds and compost piles.
Seems to work well.

I have one compost pile that I started 3 years ago with old raspberry canes, and added lots of other stuff. We are in what is considered "high desert". I have to water it a lot and they are just now starting to break down.

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Morgan Brooks

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Location: New York, USA

posted 4 days ago

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I have done this with my sunflower stalks for the past two seasons, and chopping them into short pieces worked best for me. I cut mine into pieces about two to three inches long with loppers, then spread them about two inches thick as mulch around my beds instead of digging them straight into the soil. When I mixed chopped stalks into the top few inches of soil, I added a couple of handfuls of blood meal or a bucket of fresh grass clippings per wheelbarrow of stalks, because the woody pieces can tie up nitrogen while they break down. I leave the dried heads on the compost pile, seeds and all, and I usually get a few volunteers the next spring. I would skip the mower powder, since it blows away so easily. Give it a full season, and the soil underneath stays moist and much softer to dig.

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