I've read where folks have had great results with this. I did something similar this year myself. I planted giant sunflowers at the corners of my son's fort and morning glories on the west side growing up twine. The morning glories took over all the way to the roof of the fort which is missing its canopy. They also twined all around the sunflowers. The Heavenly Blues are still blooming! I had to stake the sunflowers because they got so top heavy but a different variety might work better for a true sunflower house.

The kids are going to love it!
Tracy

Check out the book called "Sunflower Houses" by Sharon Lovejoy. It has instructions on constructing a sunflower house and is a wonderful read. A warning though, get a hankie out before you read the book if you are sentimental at heart.

Hi everybody! I also volunteered to do a sunflower house for my 1st grade daughter's class this Spring. My Dad is the principal and wanted to see a picture of what it would look like. Do any you parents have pictures of when you made one for your kids? I would love to see it and show my Dad. Thanks!
Cindy

I do bean teepees, but this sounds like much more fun! My kids are going to love this idea!

Saucy

I was thinking I could do something similar with a dog pen that we don't use anymore... plant sunflowers all around it .... but I'd be afraid the bees would sting the kids playing inside, with all those flowers there.

I made a sunflower house for my kids with the giant sunflowers. Because they tend to get top-heavy, I used twine to tie the sunflowers together for extra support at the 5 foot level. High enough for kids to walk under the twine, but right at eye level for adults.

We made a sunflower house this last year, and do have some pointers:
we bought the "sunflower house kit" -- a variety of sunflowers, short, medium, tall, early, late, yellow, brown, etc.-- from Johnny's Selected Seeds. It's a really nice mix. While Sharon Lovejoy recommends planting in a single row around the perimeter of the house, Johnny's recommends planting several rows -- the biggest ones as the "inner wall", medium around that, and smaller around that. We DIDN't do that -- we just did one row -- but next time, we will. Why? Because you will have better "walls", probably. If you have some spots that don't germinate (we ended up with 2 1/2 walls), multiple rows might cover that! As always, ground preparation is important. The spots that didn't germinate were the spots that weren't prep'd well. Another thing we'll do differently: stake mammoth sunflowers. They flopped in a wind storm in July.
Lastly, about morning glories. Johnny's doesn't include morning glories in their kit, probably because MGs can be invasive. We did plant Heavenly Blue MG seeds bought separately (I believe these don't reseed). Our morning glories had very poor germination rates. I've heard from others in the northeast that we were too drought-y this year and spring was too cold? But I don't really know what happened.
At any rate, even with only 2.5 walls, flopping, and no "ceiling" it was still lots of fun, and we WILL try again.
Good luck!

Kids loved it. Morning glories were planted too late and never really took off. I used mostly giant sunflowers, and ran twine through them at 5 feet to tie together.

I have the book "Sunflower Houses" and am determined to try this year. However, I have heard from several gardeners that sunflowers aren't great in our area - bugs get the seeds after they have been planted. Any suggestions for battling the bugs? Any other ideas for plant structures?