How To And When To Harvest Sunflowers, What Signs To Look For And How To Extract The Seeds

[Music] welcome back everyone we're going to show you how to pick sunflowers tonight how to tell when they're ready and what to look for so that you know they're at their optimal point okay the first thing you want to look for is a drooping flower head now both of these are drooping however this one if you can tell is not ready it still has yellow petals it still has a flower structure here in the center this one is the first one that started to droop and it is ready to pick and we'll show you how to tell on the back here so as you can see on the back of the sunflower here it's yellowed up quite a bit and that is a first indicator that things are almost ready but the one main indicator is this browning on the back so it's starting to dry out and really really getting ready for harvest also underneath here you can tell that the petals are completely browned out and there is no real flower structure left there's a little bit of greenness left here but those things they just fall right off okay we're also going to check and I can already see right there that one of the seeds has fallen out that means it is plump juicy and ready to get out of the head and you can see also that there is black and white striping to the seeds on seeds that are immature that black striping does not appear it only appears later when they're ready to harvest so look for all these things before you harvest and you are going to have perfect clump good seeds we're going to use a knife and we are just going to slice this off right here at the top and I'll show you you what to do next we're going to cut back about 810 inches here just so we have something to hold on to and there's our seed head our flower head we are going to get these seeds out of here and start the drying process for them all this dried old flower structure here you can just easily scrape out with your hand or a knife it really doesn't matter once you get all that out actually the seeds are just falling straight out my daughter is helping me pick things up here thank you sweetheart Wow you don't want to waste any of these right because that's why you have to help right doing here well they're getting ready for us to eat so we're going to tell the people so we're just going to rub them like this and they're gonna just fall out into our bucket here or we can also break this apart like this yeah I know this is out and put all the seeds out that's correct [Music] now you're going to get some other debris in your bucket you'll just need to separate that out screen it out however you want to do it what you can do almost immediately if you like them this way is brine them use a salt and water solution and soak them for 24 hours lay them out to dry and then roast them personally we like the EP sunflower seeds raw so we're not going to do that it's really personal preference I think they retain more of their nutrients if you eat them raw so it's really really simple to harvest these and you just want to make sure that your feed head your flower head is ready and that is really really easy to tell just follow the steps we showed you and you'll have a great sunflower harvest thanks for watching everyone hope to see you back on the next video like and subscribe and share this with your friends yes you can ha you can see us up again you can know that the flowers are ready again exactly have a great day everyone is here next time do you see you next time [Music] [Music] bye-bye

Channel: Country Living Experience: A Homesteading Journey

Views: 368,172

Keywords: how to pick sunflowers, when do you know a sunflower is ready to pick, signs a sunflower is ripe, when to harvest a sunflowre, How to extract the seeds from a sunflower, how to get the seeds out of a sunflower, how to harvest a sunflower, how to harvest sunflower seeds, harvesting sunflower seeds for planting, off grid, homestead, gardening, organic gardening, seed saving, one yard revolution, growing your greens, urban farmer curtis stone, when to harvest a sunflower

Id: od07AZHzr-g

Length: 5min 25sec (325 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2017