Sunflowers!

[Tracy Rimmer]

I'm so excited!

Most of you know that we bought an old farm house on a small acreage in Southern Manitoba last year. The place has sat empty for 25 years, but over the winter, while we settled our business in Alberta, the contractors were in the house restoring. The inside is pretty much done (as much as we can do right now), and this spring we concentrated on the outside.

There were seven barns -- all built prior to 1923, and all in really bad condition, that needed to come down. That was done in April, and the volunteer fire dept came out and burnt was was left, and did a controlled burn to deal with the 25+ years of thatch that had built up.

One barn had been used by a neighbor to store his crop. Sunflowers -- confection grade, not oil grade (this is important ). He'd left an almighty mess in there -- seeds everywhere, and the mouse population grew accordingly. The very kind local people who worked the controlled burn for us "cleared out" the one outbuilding we'd decided to keep -- which was full of this stuff. Someone used a backhoe and scraped them across to the burn pile.

So, we had a great deal of property that HAD been covered by buildings, right?

After moving out here in June, we noticed that there was "volunteer" growth on these parts. We kept telling each other we needed to do something about it -- it was going to become a problem -- but there was so much else to do, it kind of got ahead of us. A couple days ago, DH called me out to look. Some of the "weeds" were taller than him!

"We really need to do something about this -- what if it gets into the grain on either side? We don't want to tick off our neighbors," I told him. But something about the "weeds" bothered me. I knew I'd seen those leaves somewhere before, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out where.

Well, tonight I had a closer look. Guess what we've got? About two acres of "volunteer" sunflowers! I cannot WAIT until they bloom -- it's going to be GORGEOUS!

So, anyone know how to harvest and cure sunflowers?

[Windy in Kansas]

Normally harvesting on a fair sized scale is done with a conventional combine. They do have an attachment or a different grain pan in the header. The head is of course dry and breaks up readily as it goes through the combine while the thrashed seeds go into the bin.

Two acres worth will yield a lot of hand harvested heads. Kind of like hand harvesting wheat or anything else--labor intensive.

Expect you will want to ask around---or take your chances. A moth/weevil or whatever really works over the seeds in a sunflower head. Normally they require quite a bit of spraying to prevent them. Your choice of course. The bugs give that really bitter taste when you fail to look over seeds enough before putting a cheekful into your mouth. At least they are well salted and dead. lol.

Remember that sunflower blooms follow the sun. Plan you pictures around that if you want buildings, etc. in the background.

Saw a couple of fields of them this week. Here in Kansas where I live they are about 75% bloomed out.

[TedH71]

I put panty hose on my sunflowers after the seeds start developing all over in the flower head because I hate it when birds try to steal 'em!