Plant Your Own Sunflower

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Published: 15 June 2020

The Arboretum On Wheels made a series of grab-and-go educational craft kits for kids, this "how-to" instructional video goes along with the Sunflower kit.

=== Video Transcript ===

Hi! I'm Alex, an educator with the Arboretum on wheels at the Boone County Arboretum, and today I'm going to show you how to plant your very own sunflower. So let's go ahead and get started.

There are a few things you'll need to have out, that way everything goes smoothly. You'll need your biodegradable starter pot. You'll need some damp soil - I've already went ahead and made mine pretty damp. You'll need your sunflower seed - it's pretty small. And you'll need either some way to mist water onto your pot, or some way to sprinkle water onto your pot - so I have a water mister. Alright, so let's get planting!

The first thing you're going to want to do, is you're going to want to take your starter pot and you're going to want to fill it to the top with that damp soil. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. Might get a little messy that's okay - you can always clean it up. Okay, there we go.

So we've got that full of the damp soil. The next thing you're going to want to do is you're gonna want to take that sunflower seed, you're gonna want to poke a little hole - not too deep - right in the center of your soil, and you're just gonna want to drop that sunflower seed down in that hole. And then cover it up with just a little bit of potting soil, so you can't really see where that hole was now.

And then you're gonna spritz it, or sprinkle some water onto that. That way there's enough water to reach the seed. And you want to make sure that the whole time that your sunflower is growing that the soil stays damp, but not soaking wet.

I've moved from my backyard to my front yard to make sure that my sunflower gets enough Sun. And that's the last step - is to make sure that you place your sunflower in a sunny spot. This will ensure that in roughly two to ten days, your sunflower starts to germinate. Which means it starts to send those roots down into the soil.

And then in somewhere between one to two weeks, you should be able to start to see those first seedlings pop up through the dirt, and then in somewhere around eight weeks two months or so you'll actually start to be able to see your sunflower make sure you take some pictures show us the progress of your sunflower and we'll check back on ours here in a few weeks!