One way to avoid purchasing expensive pre-made trellises and cages for your garden is to make your own from wood or bamboo, but those materials can also be quite costly these days. One alternative is to grow your own!
Sunflowers are not just a great source of beauty for you garden, but they can also be recycled into some pretty nice lightweight stakes.
For best results, I recommend planting the taller varieties of sunflowers. We have several different varieties of sunflowers growing throughout our property and most of our sunflower stakes are in the 5-7 foot range with some of them bearing a diameter of up to 2 inches.
I like the idea, but how do I turn my sunflowers into garden stakes?
Once the flowers have completed their bloom and the plants start to die, simply dig up the sunflowers, remove all the leaves, and then carefully saw off the root balls and let the stalks dry out a bit. The thicker stalks are obviously the strongest, but even some of the smaller stalks prove to be strong enough to help support lightweight vine-type plants in your garden. Keep in mind that sunflower stalks are not wood and they can be crushed or broken so it’s best to tie them to each other as often as possible in order to help distribute any weight that they will bear.