Harvesting sunflowers

With autumn on the way, we have cut down two of our sunflowers so we can harvest the seeds. You do this when the heads have fallen right down to look at the ground and half of the petals have fallen off.

The seeds themselves are found underneath the yellow flower heads, which you can rub off easily with your thumb. Removing the actual seeds is a little bit more tricky as they sit within little cups in the head itself.

The easiest way to remove them from the head is to take off the stem and then slice it into six, like a pizza. This helps you to bend the face of the flower backwards to slightly separate the seeds. You can then rub them out using a thumb, just like you did with the small flowers.

We got half a cereal bowl full of seeds from just one head, and another half bowl of the flowers, which we will be feeding to the chickens. We’ll also be giving them the last few seeds in each head. The ones at the centre of the flower are small and difficult to remove, so we’ll leave them to their sharp, hard beaks.

What will we be doing with the seeds we’ve harvested? Well, we could press them to extract the oil, but actually we plan on eating them as a low-fat snack, and may try sprouting them and throwing them into a salad or stir fry.

Related posts:

1. Planting beans, lettuce and sunflowers
2. Sunflowers
3. Broad beans
4. Our plummeting food bills
5. Flowers in the garden

Tagged as: sunflowers