Sunny Sunny Sunflowers
I was excited to plant sunflowers this year, not only do they grow so large and are such a happy flower, but we'd be able to harvest the sunflower seeds both for us to eat and to feed to the chickens!
After letting the chickens out to free range before they went up to roost, I decided to walk over to the sunflowers and see if they were ready to harvest. Our tallest sunflower had already lost about half of its seeds, probably to birds, so I decided to cut off the heads (sounds weird!) that were ready and have them dry in our garage.
You can see the spots where the birds have already eaten the seeds! Luckily for us, there's still quite a few left!
We have some shelves in our garage, right off the dining room, where I decided to hang them to dry. The shelves have built in notches, so I stuck the stems into the notch and was able to hang them to dry quickly and easily.
The sunflowers will have to hang there until the back of the sunflower head turns brown, then we can pop the seeds right out! From what I've read, it takes a few weeks for the drying, so we'll post again when we collect and roast the seeds.
