growing sunflowers in your vegetable
garden is awesome
they're big beautiful flowers not
produce edible seeds they also attract
bees that not only pollinate the
sunflower itself but other crops in your
garden it's Labor Day weekend 2015 I'm
here at my son - rock growing tomatoes 8
10 foot tall Toby's 12 foot tall this
year I've surrounded myself with
sunflowers
in this video I want to talk about
harvesting sunflowers see a lot of
people talking about putting bags over
your sunflowers make sure if you do if
you use a paper bag I'm not a plastic
bag but I find that whole thing
completely unnecessary and if you google
or look up on YouTube commercial
sunflower harvest you'll find videos
where they're harvested sunflowers with
a John Deere combine just like you would
corn or wheat so I find that whole
process of putting a bag of your
sunflower completely unnecessary
when do you harvest your sunflowers you
can see they're definitely leaning over
all the flowers that are yellow were
yellow or all dried up because
straightaway you see nice well-formed
seeds so they are ready to cut
okay so I've cut all the sunflower heads
off the stalks it's actually really nice
just walking along the deck and cutting
them didn't need a ladder
I mean sometimes I'll just break the
stalk start in the field but let me go
over a little bit more about you know
when to pick you can see the bottom of
these is a nice banana yellow and you
don't want to leave them on too long
because see this area here they'll start
to mold when water sits in the flower so
this is just about right time to be
picking well it is the right time to be
picking the birds have started eating on
them too ants are also trying to climb
up a needle and this one is immature
it just didn't mature like the others
because this stuff here should just peel
off even this darker stuff in the center
so just peel off this one here it's not
mature it's not turned in the seed it's
not going to peel off
everything I've talked about so far is
really picking sunflowers so now let's
take a look at drying some sunflowers I
told you earlier I don't see the point
in putting a paper bag around your
sunflower while it's still out in the
field I don't know why people do that
protect it from birds or in case seeds
fall on the ground I'm not worried about
that I do believe in hanging up my
sunflowers to dry in a controlled
environment I mean even if you bring
them in like a porch or whatever you may
have a giant raccoon come out and eat
them all one night so I like to hang
them up yeah if you don't want seeds all
over the floor your porch maybe put a
bag under it this is a sunflower that's
completely dry they just fall off I mean
when you pick them you're wondering am I
ever gonna got all these seeds off but
when it's dry it's very easy when is the
sunflower ready to eat
here that actually you can eat them
anytime you want
but sometimes I just think that
sunflowers are for the birds