Gardening Articles: Edibles :: Vegetables Sunflower Seeds Can
Harm Plants by Charlie Nardozzi Sclerotinia fungal disease
infects nearly 360 different plants, including such favorites as
beans, cabbage, tomatoes, lettuce, sunflowers, petunias,
zinnias, and poppies. It's not the kind of disease you want to
encourage in the garden New research, however, indicates that by
feeding birds, we may unknowingly be doing just that. Steve
Nameth, a researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus,
started noticing sunflower seeds infected with sclerotinia
fungus while feeding his birds. The fungal infected seeds are
about the same size as healthy seeds, but are irregularly shaped
and white inside if broken open. As any good researcher would,
he became curious about how much sclerotinia infected seed is in
a bag of sunflower seeds. Nameth bought a random sample of 10
commercial bird seed mixes and found that half had sclerotinia
present in the feed. Birds won't eat sunflower seeds infected
with the fungus, so they drop to