I grew sunflowers within the confines of my veggie garden for 8 or 10 years, but finally stopped for several reasons. Now, I plant them further away and am happier with them. I use all kinds of flowers to attract beneficials to the garden, but sunflowers are no longer one of them.

First of all, sunflower roots have some alleopathic qualitites that can adversely affect the growth of some plants close to them. So, you cannot plant them too close to some veggies.

Secondly, I found that sunflowers attracted tons and tons of stinkbugs and leaf-footed bugs, both of which can devastate tomatoes and other vegetables, and both of which are very hard to control organically. That's the main reason I moved them out of the veggie garden. The last think I needed was anything that attracted more stink bugs and more leaf-footed bugs.

Third, they attracted butterflies (I think it was the bordered patch) whose caterpillars ate up their leaves like crazy. So, I'd end up with big tall stalks, sometimes with a flower but more often without, that had leaves stripped to the stem. Not real attractive, and without leaves to conduct photosynthesis, you don't get sunflowers. Once they'd devoured the sunflowers, the caterpillars moved on to nearby veggie plants.

Fourth, if you let them form the seed heads, which I did because I wanted the seed heads for the birds, the seed heads will attract critters like squirrels and birds that you don't want in the garden. Why? Because once those birds and squirrels are there, they may peck tomatoes and other plants that you value more than the sunflowers.

Finally, in the hottest part of the summer, especially in July and August, sunflower foliage can turn into spider mite nurseries. With spider mites showing up in huge numbers here a couple of weeks ago, the last thing I need is any sort of plant whose foliage they love the way they love sunflowers.

Oh, there's one more thing. If you are in a rural to semi-rural area and your veggie garden is unfenced or has a fence the varmints can dig or crawl under, you should know that there's some gubs that often inhabit the ground where sunflowers are planted. The armadilloes or skunks (or maybe both) will dig up your sunflowers and everything growing around them to get to those grubs. One year, I went out to the garden on Mother's Day Morning to find that every single plant in our then-unfenced garden had been dug up or knocked over by the tunneling of the varmints to get those grubs. That is a day we still refer to as the Mother's Day Massacre. We spent the entire day trying to replant everything that hadn't dried out enough to die already, and then putting up a short fence around the garden. That short fence is now a tall fence because of the deer, by the way.

I love the way sunflowers look, and they will attract some beneficial insects, but I grow them well away from the garden now and am happier with them than I used to be when they were in the veggie garden. I always loved the way they looked in the veggie garden, but just didn't care for the pests they attracted. If you grow them away from the veggie garden, you can attack the pests on them more vigorously than you would if they were close to edible crops.

We have fire ants and other ants here and I've never found corn meal controlled them way enough that I could see a difference, and I've been dealing with ants of one kind or another in the garden for as long as I can remember, dating back to at least the 1970s. I use an organic fire ant killer that contains spinosad and it works pretty well, certainly better than any other organic remedy I've ever tried--and I have tried them all.

Hope this info is helpful,

Dawn

I have grown few sunflowers plants in the vegetable beds last time, vegetable crops growing near/under sunflower plant were not that happy. May be sunflowers might have an allelopathic effects on the other plants, but not sure. -Chandra

Well, this is good to know. Thanks for bringing this up! Glad I haven't planted all those sunflower seeds. lol

Susan, Life out here in the country is way different from life in the city. When we have pests in high numbers, they can strip plants in a matter of days. It happens all the time. Usually it is army worms or grasshoppers or whatever. This year it is a wide assortment of caterpillars from a variety of parents.

With sunflowers, the Bordered Patch just destroys them, and whatever little bit survives is then preyed upon by spider mites and stink bugs. Then the stink bugs move on to veggie plants as their population grows. When I grew sunflowers with my garden in town, nothing really bothered them. Nothing. Here, it is a whole different story.

I used to plant dozens, sometimes hundreds, of sunflowers in and around my garden. I loved the sunflowers then, I love them still, but they cannot be planted close to the garden in any shape, form or fashion. It took me several years here to accept that I had to move them away from the veggies because they were serving as a "gateway" that encouraged pests. Maybe in a city garden, it wouldn't be as issue but out here in the sticks it is.

I garden for the wildlife as much as I can, but the veggie garden is more for us than it is for them, and this year the caterpillars are shredding it. I am about to go nuclear on the caterpillars in my veggie garden if the parasitic wasps don't hurry up and show up and do their thing.

So, while most wildlife is welcome here, and I've always tried to encourage the lepidoptera and not harm or discourage them, I have moved the sunflowers away from the garden and have no regrets other than I miss seeing sunflowers planted in every row of my garden. We have almost 15 acres of land where the butterflies and moths can do what they do every place on the property, but this year they are doing too much of it inside the fenced garden....and that's with no sunflowers in it to draw more of them into it. I have about 15 seed packs of various sunflowers, but haven't sown a single seed yet because with all the Bordered Patch cats I am finding everywhere, young sunflower sprouts wouldn't last 3 days after emerging from the soil.

Dawn

I don't need to plant anything that will draw in more pests this year. WOW, there's a lot of bugs. I am not seeing the bugs that are doing the damage in the garden, but one day my broccoli looked beautiful and the next day it looked horrible with some plants almost gone. I have spread Sluggo around the ground, sprayed a little powdered DE, and covered it with a row cover. I know nothing else that will help, that I am willing to use. I had noticed some damage to tomatoes which looks like flea beetle damage, but doesn't seem to be hurting the plant much. Today I noticed that something is taking big bites out of my container tomatoes. This may be a tough year.

Carol,

I've never seen pests this bad here. I think we had a year when they were this bad in Texas in the late 1970s or early 1980s, but they were not this bad this early in the year.

I am seeing everything you're seeing. I have some tomato plants in the big garden in the ground with about a dozen tomatoes on them and those plants have been stripped of almost all their foliage in the last 48 hours, and every tomato has been chewed on. Most of these plants were between 30-36" tall and look very healthy. When I discovered this mess of devoured plants today, I about had a conniption fit. I went on a seek-and-destroy mission, squishing every caterpillar I found on or near a tomato plant. There weren't that many that I could find, so they must be doing the damage at night. I scratched around in the mulch with my trowel and found and destroyed 5 cutworms--four climbing ones and 1 regular black one. Because of snakes, I just hate going into the garden at night.

I may have to buy some Bt and spray the veggie garden with it. I have not sprayed the whole garden with Bt ever. Oddly, the only plants not showing new damage are the cole crops, but that could be because I found the young cats on them and destroyed them. That was weeks ago, though, and we've had plenty of checkered whites and cabbage whites flitting around the property, but no new cats. I did spray those cole plants with neem but it has rained a great deal since then and you'd think the neem would have washed off or degraded by now.

I've even hand-picked cats off the larkspur, and I've grown larkspur ever since we moved here in 1999 and never have seen caterpillars on it.

I've been working for days on the red spider mites on my two potted brugmansias and am not having much luck with them either. It is quite vexing.

I am seeing some beneficial insects around, most notably some ladybugs, though not nearly enough, and some green lacewings. Usually by now we'd have huge swarms of all kinds of wasps, including the tiny predatory wasps, and they just seem AWOL this year. Wherever the beneficials are and whatever they are doing, more of them need to get busy and start devouring my pests.

If this is an indication of what lies ahead, it is going to be a long, long year.

Dawn

It's so strange. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I haven't had that many insects in Guthrie yet. I saw my first cricket the other day, but beyond that and an incredible swarm of craneflies, nothing has nibbled on my tomato plants yet (knock on wood). Last year, I had a horrible time with squash bugs. I know many of you said you didn't even see them last year. I'm hoping all the yucky bugs my garden got last year will decide to not show up this year, especially the squash bugs.

Consequently, I grew sunflowers in my veggie garden last year. I decided not to grow them this year. I didn't have the seed (I grew dwarf sunflowers) and I really couldn't be bothered. But I have a lone volunteer that came up this year. And IT'S foliage has been devoured by hungry insects, however none of my tomatoes have been touched.

Kelly

Dawn, you are so right about the differences between the city and rural areas. I know my friend who lives in the county always talks about the hordes of butterflies she sees, while I am lucky to see a select few. I really hoped that with the number of Sunflowers I grew last year that I'd see some butterflies on them like the BP, Gorgone or Silvery Checkerspot, but not a single one.

I haven't seen too many pests, altho I know there are some out there (of the chewing, leaf consuming types). Most of mine are the typical garden pests like slugs, cutworms, and such. For the last 2 years I've had swarms of Spotted Cucumber Beetles that devour my Sunflowers and other Composites. I am really just inviting more trouble by growing Cucumbers and other cucurbits this year, aren't I? I'm think plant covers and hand pollination are in the charts for me. And that will take care of the Squash Bugs and friends as well. Keep in mind, tho, that I only have a few plants to contend with and not rows upon rows of them.

Oh, Kelly, weren't the Crane Flies just horrible this year? Ugh.......

Susan

Susan, If I knew then, what I knew now, I might have looked for property a tiny bit closer to town. I'm not sure if being a mile or two outside of town would be better than be further away though. I thought our biggest pests would be armadilloes, rabbits and deer, and in a way they are, but oh my, the caterpillars are driving me insane.

It isn't just "me" either. I looked for Bt in the big box stores (Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's) in the larger towns to our north (Ardmore) and to our south (Gainesville, TX) and they were sold out, and have been for days. TSC was sold out when we were in there last week and this week. I finally found Bt at a small independent feed and seed store in Gainesville this morning, so I have it here sitting on the table, and I can/will use it if the levels of damage do not diminish. I also noticed big empty gaps in the synthetic pesticide section at the big box stores and I had to look to see what was sold out. It was all the various forms of Sevin. Tractor Supply's shelf was bare too, but there was a newly-opened case of powdered Sevin sitting on the floor by the bare shelf, so clearly they were in the midst of restocking the stores.

This morning a white-lined sphinx flew into my greenhouse when I opened the door. I told it to go elsewhere to lay its eggs, but I suspect it will do whatever it pleases.

Milkweed plants (the native green milkweed that we call Antelope Horns here) in the pasture that I couldn't even find 2 weeks ago are suddenly huge and beginning to bloom, so that's good news.

Crane Flies have been horrible for about 6 weeks, but their numbers are dropping every day here no, so they have peaked. Ditto for the June bugs, which this year have been March bugs. I am seeing fewer moths this week than last but I don't know if that translates yet to less damage since the moths undoubtedly laid lots of eggs.

This year, in an effort to draw the cabbage worms away from the broccoli and cabbage, I planted mustard because they love mustard and usually gobble it right up. So, guess which plants in my garden show virtually no damage while everything else is holey? Yep, the mustard. I have beautiful perfect mustard crops. Sometimes trap crops just don't work like they're supposed to, and I guess this is one of those years.

Everything is accelerating here because of the early heat. Flowers have bloomed a month or two ahead of schedule, pests have made early appearances, etc. It is bizarre. I also think it partially explains the heavy insect damage because bugs that usually do damage in Feb and Mar, for example, have had the company of plenty of other insects that usually don't show up until Apr, May, Jun or Jul. I wish I could know what that means in terms of what the pests will do in the coming months.

And, yes Susan, I think the cucumber beetles are likely to give you more trouble since you're growing more cucurbits. However, nothing in nature is predictable. Who would have predicted I wouldn't see a single squash bug in a hot year like we had last year? Or that the Colorado Potato Beetles would be totally absent this year (at least so far). Or that I wouldn't have squash bugs here but Kelly would have them up there in northern OK. Mother Nature likes to keep us on our toes by throwing surprises our way just about nonstop.

One thing that's missing at our house this year is wasps. We had some swarm on the first really hot day, and then they were around a day or two and I haven't seen one since. Usually by now, they are everywhere. That's bad news. I haven't seen predatory wasps either, which probably helps explain all the caterpillar damage in the garden. I've order some wasps for delivery next week and I'll release them in an effort to restore some balance to the garden's ecosystem that it is sorely lacking right now.

Dawn

okiedawn - I know what you mean. Here's a photo of a sunflower that recently got swarmed by probably 150 caterpillars (some can be seen hanging out under its leaves below) that were quickly decimating its leaves to just a sheer brown paper-thin layer.

Any idea what kind of caterpillar these are? They about 3/4" long, light-green and hairy.

Also, how can you prevent or get rid of these caterpillars? It does seem as if the sunflower plays easy host to a lot of pests, for some reason?

Here is a link that might be useful: