How To Harvest Mammoth Sunflower Seeds
I love sunflowers! As a matter of fact they are one of my favorite flowers. I mean, what’s not to love? They’re super easy to grow, they bloom prolifically and I’ve always loved how people’s faces light up when you mention them! I used to help my grandma plant a row of Mammoth Sunflowers at the edge of her garden every year. Of course I love the look of the cheery yellow blossoms. And my mom always comments about how beautiful they are when I would visit her and grandma.
One year I planted sunflowers along the chicken fence side of a friend’s garden. Those huge sunflower plants offered shade during the heat of the day for her chickens. Oh, and her bees loved them too. That’s a lot of bang for your package-of-seeds buck! But what do you do when it’s time to harvest those sunflower seeds. Come see what I did.
Harvesting The Seed Head
Take your pruners to the garden to fetch that head of seeds. You’ll have to reach waaaaay up to cut that heavy sunflower head from the plant. Then bring it to a covered porch and allowed it to dry a little more thoroughly. As long as nothing comes to snack on the sunflower heads, you can leave it here as long as you like.
Once dry, it’s harvesting time for those sunflower seeds. Get out your sharpened #2 pencils kids, here’s the complicated instructions:
You clean off any clinging flower matter remaining on the head. Then you bring the head of sunflower seeds into your kitchen. Holding the huge bloom in your hand, use your thumbs to dislodge the dried seeds. Yep, that’s it!
The sunflower seeds then sit spread out on newspaper for several more days just to assure they’re completely dry before you gather them up & put them in a paper sack for storage. Some people enjoy roasting/eating the seeds, but make sure you save some for next year’s plantings. You can also give them to your chickens or add them to your wild birdseed mix.
Planting Sunflowers
This year’s sunflower story goes back to yearpasts. I had planted a row of mammoth sunflower seeds in my grandma’s garden as I usually do. When they had finished blooming I harvested the seeds from one of those huge flower heads to replant. Since it wasn’t an heirloom variety I knew the resulting plants wouldn’t come back true to the parent plant. But I was curious to see what I’d get.
When I planted them the next spring, I got a variety of very tall plants. Some had the single large sunflower head with all the sunflower seeds like the parent plant. Others were equally tall but had a somewhat smaller sunflower bloom. Some (equally tall) had many regular-sized sunflower blossoms. Beautiful!
I really loved the one with the many blossoms. So maybe I should try this experiment again. I’ll harvest from the large sunflower head this next year & plant again the following year to see what I get.
As with any other vegetation, you add the spent plants to the compost. Another great thing about sunflowers…
