Can you recommend any short, large-seeded sunflowers?

Question

I'm wanting to grow a lot more sunflowers (Helianthus) for food, these days, but one of my concerns is they get really tall, and sometimes I like shorter plants.

If you know of any sunflowers just like the giant ones (e.g. Mammoth Gray Striped, Mongolian Giant, and Black Russian), except with shorter, stockier stems (I'm thinking maybe one to three feet tall), that would be great. If they have smaller heads with the same large size of seeds, that's fine, too, but I prefer larger heads if possible.

I don't know if such sunflowers exist, but it seems like breeding them could be pretty possible, if not (granted my neighbors grow sunflowers that would probably cross with mine). If they grow multiple flowers, but still have large seeds and maybe also large heads, that's even better.

Answer 1

I found a couple sunflowers that look like they could work. They are Dwarf Sunspot and Yellow Pygmy. They appear to have large heads and large seeds, and appear to be dwarfs. Dwarf Sunspot only gets 1–2 feet tall, has 10" heads on average (according to outsidepride.com), and has edible seeds. Yellow Pygmy gets about 2 feet tall with 8–10 inch blossoms. So, they're bigger than many sunflowers (but still not huge). The seeds are probably smaller, too, but perhaps big enough for practical purposes (I haven't grown them yet to find out, though).

Someone told me today about a variety that gets about three feet tall with large heads, as large as Mammoth Gray Stripe's (a big field of them in Parma, Idaho a year or two ago), but I have no idea what kind it was.

Crossing Magnolia Giant with Dwarf Sunspot might have good results (since Magnolia Giant has extra large seeds).