I planted one Mammoth sunflower seed in a one foot by one foot square of one of my square foot gardens. It grew to be taller than me, not a great feat since I'm only 5'4", but still, in a few months this plant grew from a tiny seed to a huge plant! Of course I didn't take a picture of it when it was beautiful and yellow, but I did take one after we cut it off the stem and brought it in to roast.
Isn't the spiral pattern lovely? For those math folks out there, the rows are sequences of Fibonacci numbers which I won't try to explain, but it makes for the most efficient packing of the seeds into the seed head. The way God does things is pretty amazing, beauty and efficiency all in one package.
After we cut the head, Dave did the grunt work of rubbing the florets off the seeds, which is a somewhat tedious job, because not only did he have to rub off the florets, but he also had to remove the part of the plant that held the seeds in place so we could get down to just the seeds. Next year we may try doing this part outside in front of an electric fan, tossing the stuff in the air to separate the lighter stuff from the heavy seeds. We really like to eat sunflower seeds, so we will plant more than just one next year.
I always wondered how the sunflower seeds in the shell we bought had such a lovely salt coating, but no salt crystals, a few minutes on the internet, and I discovered their secret: soak the seeds in salt water overnight. Who knew? I'm glad we soaked them, the water was a little dirty looking, so besides adding that lovely saltiness, they got cleaner! Next, a trip to the oven on the cookie sheet.
That is all the seeds from just one head on an average size cookie sheet. We roasted them about forty minutes at 300*F, until they started to brown.
Voila! the finished product. We of course had to try them out immediately and found that many of our little shells had no seed. Bummer. The ones we found with kernels were wonderful, but they were too few. I researched the situation a little and I think that the problem is lack of sufficient pollination. The seed head is actually not a flower, but a head that holds hundreds of little florets, each one needing to be pollinated, each one having a little seed under the floret that doesn't develop the fruit (kernel) if it isn't pollinated by our busy helpers, the bees. Sunflowers are self pollinating, so they don't need more than one plant to fruit, but with most fruits, the more the merrier! Also, more flowers attract more bees. That fits in nicely with our plan to plant more sunflowers next year. If we clear enough area and have the space we may grow some of the black oil sunflowers so we can have some for the birds. For now, I guess we may as well enjoy as much of the fruits, or seeds of our labor as possible.
I see a large sunflower every year during my drive near downtown. It is planted beside a telephone pole on the patch of dirt between the sidewalk and the street. It makes the drive more cheerful.
ReplyDeleteMy father-in-law always planted several rows at the end of his garden. I've heard that if you plant flowers near your vegetables the insects will go for the brighter flowers.