Sunflowers ready to be planted.

These sunflowers are in a 200 tray, which has 200 cells. 200 seeds per tray (although there are a few cells with double seeds). When the roots fill the cell well enough to hold the root ball together they are ready to plant. That generally takes about a week to ten days from seeding.

We seed these and put them in the greenhouse until they're ready. Under ideal conditions the stems would be straight and not too long, but during the warm weather the plants grow rapidly so the stems get long. Also, the small cell dries out rapidly during warm weather so it could need water twice a day. Since I'm a mile away on the farm and don't always get to keep things watered on a timely schedule, the stems droop occasionally. Watering picks them up, but combined with the long stems from the heat, they tend to tangle a bit.

That doesn't affect the plant, only the planting. The plants will straighten up once they're in the ground. The challenge is getting them untangled and out of the tray. I hire other people to do that part.

The sunflowers are for cutting, not seeds. These are hybrid pollenless sunflowers, bred for bouquets. Pollenless sunflowers don't drop the yellow pollen on your table when you put the flowers there. Since they're pollenless, they're mostly sterile. They have seeds, but there's nothing in them. The birds try a few occasionally, but lose interest quickly. PCO is Pro Cut Orange. They cost around 2 cents per seed, quite different from bird seed. Since the price is fairly high we transplant them instead of broadcasting seed. It also allows us to produce a nice stand of sunflowers since the ones that don't germinate don't get planted.