The rise and fall of my Mammoth Sunflowers

This year we planted 6 russian mammoth sunflowers. 3 in one garden and 3 in another. The plan was to plant pole beans around the base and have them climb the sunflowers for poles!

Last year we let them climb up our netting but that caused them to partly grow outside the net and they got chomped a lot by deer :/

I wasn't sure it would work because there was a possibility the beans would grow faster than the sunflowers but all went perfectly as planned.

The little sunflower seedlings grew incredibly fast!

The seed packet said between 6 - 10 feet tall but I believe they may have made it past 10 feet, possibly 12 for the tallest by eyeballing it.

As they were growing so tall I was getting worried about being able to harvest the beans at the top, there wasn't really any clear space around to set up a ladder.

You can see the beans were going even higher than the flower at some point and reaching for the sky:

Inevitably as they got taller and heavier the heads began to droop...

We are next to the coast so we get quite a lot of windstorms. Whenever it was windy I would look out the window and watch them violently sway around LOL. The first one started to topple:

We managed to secure it back up with a lot of string and hoped for the best but this weekend all 3 in one garden came completely down RIP

The stumps...

The bright side was that I was able to harvest all the beans that were hiding at the top so I got a good final haul and processed another bag of green beans to freeze:

We are in the start of hurricane season so I think it's best that they came down and I am pretty thankful that they lasted so long :)