Beginner Gardening: New to gardening and sunflowers. Need some help., 2 by dlefik

dlefik wrote:
Hi everyone. New guy here. Got kind of bit by the planting bug this year for the first time ever and decided to give a shot at doing some sunflowers amongst a few other things. This is about the progress I'm making with my sunflowers though and thought some of the experts could give some good advice.

I decided to take the indoor peat pot approach to starting my sunflowers since I live in a country area and my house has some annoying little baby bunnies running amok all hours of the day and night. Initially, I really just wanted to direct sow the seeds but I just didn't want to take my chances.

Anyhow, I attached some pictures showing the progress of the sunflowers and all seems really good so far, for a beginner anyway. Sorry for the quality of the one picture as I was taking it in low light through aquarium glass. But the ones in the aquarium are burpee girasol chianti hybrid sunflowers and the other ones with the popsicle sticks marked sunflower on them are the burpee girasol mammoth ones.

I was taking a look under some of the pots today and happen to notice several of them had about an inch or so of the root coming out of the bottom of the pots. Just one root so far. Is this going to be ok for a while or is this a sign I need to get them in the ground quick? I was just kind of concerned with there being an exposed root, and I know from researching that sunflowers grow very large roots quickly.

I don't mind taking a chance putting them in ground since the rabbits tend to eat longer grass closer to the house and I think they might be ok if they can grow fast enough. Money's kind of tight right now, so I don't really have the means to buy a bunch of fencing and crazy contraptions to keep them out. I'm putting these sunflowers in my front yard around a fence which is relatively close to the road, so I would think that would force the rabbits to stay more to the house and less out in the open.

I don't have any other critters besides the rabbit to worry about, but I don't want to prematurely plant these in the dirt and kill them, but at the same time, I'm really nervous I'm going to kill them in the pots with the roots exposed. I've done some researching for some days now and it seems like I've seen so much info saying not to plant them until their true leaves appear, but with these pots not being really huge makes me kind of nervous they'll rapidly outgrow them before the leaves even show up.

Hope someone could lend some good info on whether or not I should just plant them now, or take my chances waiting. Thanks so much!