With the recent winds and storms, I have noticed a lot of sunflowers toppling over in the garden. When I go to cut them down, I see that they are hollow inside and the inside is quite soft and squishy. What causes this? Is there anything I can do to stop it?

We have the same problem with our sunflowers toppling over and being hollow. At first I thought it was stalk borer, and indeed we do have stalk borer damage on some of them. But our problem was too widespread for it to be just a borer.

  

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