Curious if anyone here has tried this out. Some sunflowers will grow up to 12 feet high and a neighbor who grew some of these giants had to take a chainsaw to the stems and then the pull the
roots out with a truck afterwards. This got me to thinking..
If you got a temporary fenceline planted with these monsters how would be the best way to proceed after the first year? I am assuming that they will mostly
feed the birds or get harvested so there won't be a LOT of random sunflowers coming up everywhere later.
use them to grow vines on and replant more sunflowers the next year? how close could you do this and expect the new sunflowers to thrive? Jerusalem artichokes (in my VERY limited
experience with them) seemed not to share very well with anything else, do sunflowers tend to be the same, or would it be just a function of their sheer size shading everything else out?
I was thinking that a nice little line of maybe a foot or two wide of old giant sunflower stalks that had been planted close together and later covered with vines might make a nice boundary fence...Some of these sunflowers have hollow stems so it might be important to be sure to get the ones with a solid stem?
You could plant them much closer together than suggested for maximum height? Not many people NEED a 12 foot high fence...and the stems might get thicker? or would that just make them all more likely to topple over? Suggested spacing the first year and then an alternate row snuggled up to the first row but offset the second year?
When I heard about the chainsaw I was also wondering if sunflower stalks could be used like bamboo which won't grow in my climate but sunflowers will.
All just thoughts chasing themselves around in my head..any experience/opinions/thoughts are invited.