To go with sunflowers, tomatoes are a great choice. Birds and bees will visit your tomatoes more often because of the sunflowers. Also, look for other plants that go well with sunflowers.
Grow Tomatoes as Sunflower Companion Plants
Sunflowers make me happy, and fresh tomatoes taste great. To go with sunflowers, tomatoes are a great choice. I’m so glad that they look great together in a yard. The common sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) is what I grow. Some of my plants get as big as 12 feet or more. Of course, I have to put stakes in the ground to support them because their big flower heads (up to 10 inches across) make them top heavy. This is especially true when sunflower seeds are added to the heads and weigh them down.
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Sunflowers Attract Pollinators to Tomatoes
It’s great that the sunflower heads bring in bees when they’re flowering. In the US and other places, the number of bees has dropped by a lot. Native bees and the honeybee that was brought to North America from other places feed many of our food crops and other plants.
That is scary. When the plants’ seeds are ready, birds in the finch family come to eat them. Without a doubt, you should grow sunflowers to feed birds.
It’s great that bees come to the sunflower heads when they bloom. There are a lot fewer bees in the US and other places. Many of the plants and foods we eat are pollinated by native bees and honeybees that came to North America from other places. That’s very scary. Birds in the finch family come to eat the seeds when they are ready. Without a question, you should grow sunflowers to give to birds.
The bees that come to my plants to drink the nectar from the sunflowers also pollinate the tomato blooms. This is why I get so many tomatoes. My tomato plants are right next to the sunflower patch.
This means that the bees can pollinate the tomato flowers without having to move very far from the sunflower flowers that have nectar. Most of the tomato flowers get pollinated by them, so I get fruit from almost all of them.
More Sunflower Companion Plants
“Back in the spring, I planted Maximilian sunflower.” It did really well in my clay soil. What color-contrasting plant should I grow next to it that will do well in the same conditions? Reader Sheila Dyke asks.
Melinda Myers, an expert in gardening, says, “There are a few perennials that go well with the 5-foot-tall, summer-to-fall-flowering Maximilian sunflower.” The ice blue flowers of willow amsonia are a great way to start the season.
The fine leaves look great all year, but in the fall, they turn a beautiful orange color. There is also blue fake indigo (Baptisia) that blooms in the spring. The blue flowers turn into pretty black seedpods as they age. The blue-green leaves make the flowers and seedpods stand out.
Swamp milkweed that blooms in the summer will make you and the butterflies that come to visit happy. Around the same time as Maximillian, the big purple flowers of tall ironweed (Vernonia) show up. They look beautiful together.
Turtlehead flowers in white or pink will finish off the season. Add some ornamental grasses, like our native grassland dropseed and Northwind and other types of switchgrass. With their leaves, flowers, fall color, and seed heads that stay put, these plants add a lot of different textures and yearly interest.