Harvesting, roasting sunflower seeds

If you let your heads hang in our warm and lingering fall and the local wildlife is starting to take an interest, it’s time to harvest your sunflowers.  Here’s how: 

Sunflowers signal their readiness in several ways.  The easiest to see is that the ripe seeds start falling out.  Pick up a few and split them open to see if the seed is plump with meat, or watch the neighborhood squirrels – they never miss an opportunity for an easy meal. 

Bagging the head with perforated plastic bags will help keep birds and squirrels from pilfering, but if you want to harvest before you start losing seeds, look for the heads to be droopy and down turned with the back changing from green to yellow/brown. Petals will be shriveled and falling, leaving the plumped seeds exposed.  

At this point – before the seeds start falling – cut the head off the stem, leaving one foot of stem attached. Hang them upside-down in a warm place until dry and the seeds separate easily.  Then use this stem to turn over and hold the head upside down while rubbing the seeds out by hand.  Dry and store them or roast them in a 300 degree F oven for 15-25 minutes.

If you prefer your seeds salted, soak them overnight in a brine of 2 tablespoons of salt to 1 cup of water. Boil the brine, seeds and all, for a few minutes, drain, then spread them thinly on a cookie sheet and roast in a 200 degree F oven for 3 hours or until crisp. Roasted long enough, they’re easy to shell.

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Fast tool for taking your soil’s temp

Ok, I’ll admit it:  I rush the season.  When the weather warms and eagerness overcomes my better sense, I push seedlings and seeds into the soil, tucking them in at the first hint of spring. 

 Because of this I wait as days turn to weeks, wondering if the seeds rotted in the soil.  I wait with impatience as seedlings sit and sulk, unimpressed by their new home.  They’re not dead; I check – those seeds just lay in the ground doing nothing as I put up trellises and string, ready sun shades and mulch.  Clearly one of us is slacking.

Turns out it’s the soil.  If your ground isn’t warm and cozy, the plants won’t thrive, and the jump start I gave the season will fizzle  until that soil heats up.  

Fortunately for us there’s a nifty website you can go to, to check the soil temperatures in your area.  Check out greencastonline.com, a site run by a major company who likes to make sure its seed succeeds.  I’m not endorsing anything here – I just like their soil temp site.   It’s under agronomic crops, should you decide you’d like to click over to weather, then back again. 

Boy, this is fast – currently our soil is 48F, good for planting kale, lettuce, pak choi, parsnips, peas, and spinach.  But days to maturity come into play too, so think ahead to conditions that will be in play once the plant starts producing.  Peas may fry and lettuce bolt in our balmy 90F summer.  But a few more degrees and I can plant the chard or leeks.

Beans typically need soils to be warmer than 60F, ideally 68 – 70F; all of the truly tender crops – tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, corn and melons need the soil to be 70F.  Otherwise they sit there, brooding over the fate that left them in the hands of a rude, thoughtless gardener who plops their bottoms into chilly soil.  Fedco has a great chart for crops and the soil temps they need for planting.

With these two tools you can click on your area to get information on your soil, precipitation, weather, etc.  And this year I intend to use them, so that when I pop my plants in, they’ll leap from the ground and I can get down to the business of gardening, not waiting.

 **Yes, you can warm the soil with plastic, walls o water or cold frames.  Take your soil temp after five days to see how far your temps have increased.

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