Making Flour from SunFlower Stalks.

hi guys we are back this week at one of our favorite places here on pender at ohana farms and as you can see we are in one of their beautiful flower orchards here on the property and julia here on the farm has been making beautiful bouquets all summer long and has some leftover sunflowers that she wasn't going to be using so we are going to harvest those today and use the stalks to turn into flour which is something that we didn't know was possible up until recently so this will be an experiment for us the first time we're trying it to to see how it goes but obviously part of our goal here is to use as much as we can and uh we certainly wish we'd known about this during our our first year to only eat what we could catch grow uh harvest and raise because we definitely could have used more flowers so um we're gonna harvest some of these take them back to our place and try out the experiment and see how it goes so follow along those are heavy yep actually this is a good segue he thinks this happened for a reason sometimes i don't know how well you can zoom in on this stuff but that kind of white foamy substance in the center there is what we're going to be making the uh the flower out of so it almost looks like a it feels like a styrofoam it's kind of spongy but that's the stuff we're going to take out and dry out and turn into uh to some flour get these bad boys back they're a lot heavier than i thought they were going to be that might get them off okay yeah dave i got your bouquet of flowers two more videos i can put this in we're now back at the house and we've got all the sunflowers back to our place and now we're going to kind of chop them up into about one or two foot stalks and we're going to strip all of the leaves and the flower heads as well which are going to go to our chickens uh sunflower seeds are a great nutritional thing for chickens especially going into the colder months into the fall here so it'll be a nice little treat for them and we'll cut up the stalks and get started on trying to make some flour our chickens know a treat's coming okay so we got all of our stalks done here and we're gonna save some of our flower heads uh we're gonna dry them out and save them for the winter uh sunflower seeds are a really good nutritional snack for your poultry during the colder winter months especially when they're molting and the rest we're gonna take up and feed to them right now and sunflowers are a great flower to grow if you have poultry there's no poisonous or toxic parts in the plant so they can eat the leaves the stems uh they love picking up the seeds the petals are edible so we're going to take that up and feed it to them and see how excited they are for a treat there's lots of birds out there this will be good that's they always look interested in the beginning we'll see though okay [Music] ah they're eating it but they're not quite sure okay so we've got all of our stocks that are ready to go now and we showed you a little bit earlier when we were at ohana farms in the field but it's that kind of white pithy center that we want to get out that we're going to turn into flowers so we're going to split these stalks and see if we can uh scoop out the middle i can cut them properly just like kindling perfect tougher to get out than i thought it really is like a styrofoamy kind of texture i need one of those like grapefruit spoons you know those kids like the ones that's got the jagged edges when you're scooping out grapefruit i think that was before my time there babe thanks it's gonna be easier by hand so i'm excited for this this turns into a lot more flour than our wheat does it's gonna be great cool okay stocks left that's kind of the white pithy styrofoam feeling stuff that uh we're apparently going to turn into flower we should look and see if anything we can do the rest of the stalks fibers or something maybe use it to prop up some of our bean plants or something yeah after this one i may go get a knife and try that and see if it works any better so i'm gonna be hearing about this for a long time but uh steph is a genius if you have a small metal bass stir alone of all things baster's is what steph found me to use he doesn't know how to use it herself but ah this works very very well we found to do this so put on there slide it down that works way better than uh then the spoon did it taking that out so some kind of tool like that you can use to scoop out will save you a lot of time look how well that worked good job baby let me hear it again all right we're down to our last two here and as you can see we kind of made some good progress almost got a full bowl there of the uh kind of pulp in the center so we'll uh finish these two off and then head inside to start drying it out yeah if you can find a tool like this steph saved the day on this one how much easier that was than the spoon strips it perfectly okay got our bowl full of pulp pretty happy with that turned out pretty well so we've got our bowl full of pulp there that turned out really well we're gonna go inside and uh start dehydrating this and dry it out and yeah if anyone has any suggestions uh below on what they've done uh with gardening stuff and using sunflower stalks leave us a comment below we'd love to figure out something to do with these as well so let's go inside we'll start drying this out the next step we're going to do is put it into the oven to dehydrate it and you just want it on super low so the lowest that our oven goes is 170 degrees so we're just going to put it in at that temperature and the honest answer is we're not sure how long yet this is the first time we've tried this so we're going to kind of monitor it as it's drying out in there and we'll let you know exactly how long we left it before the end so so you have an idea of what you'd have to do so we'll put that in and get started we need two trays uh okay we'll come check back in in 20 minutes half an hour and see how they're doing okay so it's been about uh an hour we checked it every 20 minutes or so so we've done three 20-minute blocks here uh at 170 so we're going to pull these out now they're kind of dry which i think is what we want so let's take these out of the oven a little popping up too bad because it's on the lowest temperature there so you can kind of see maybe um that these are really kind of gonna break apart easily now they're quite dry um all the kind of moisture has gone out of them so we're gonna try grinding them up and see what we get it's probably gonna take a few goes to do them all but we'll throw these in here it really does feel like styrofoam like little packing peanuts okay close that up [Music] let's see what it looks like holy so as you can see that got in some very fine powder there's still some chunks in there but we're going to empty this out uh and filter it and put in the next load and same as usual we're gonna put it through one of our sifters here [Music] okay so uh this was really interesting for us to be honest we've got uh a really good amount of flour compared to what we normally get from our wheat but it's very very fine and i wasn't expecting it to be quite this fine it's almost like a dust um yeah but interesting experiments so we've got a good amount of flour that we got there and sometime in the next week or so we'll try to actually cook something with this to see how it works this flower um so if you follow us on facebook or instagram at love and off the land sometime this week we'll post uh how this flower worked out when we actually try and cook something so that's it hit subscribe below and thanks for following along and hope you found this uh as educational as we have trying it out for the first time [Music] you

Channel: Lovin Off The Land

Views: 36,141

Keywords: Living Off the land, homesteading, homestead, flour, sunflower flour, sunflower, how to make flour, alternative flour, gluten free flour, how to make flour without wheat, non wheat flour, gardening, what to do with sunflowers, sunflower stalks, how to make flour from sunflowers, vegetable gardening, grow your own food, homesteading couple, couple grows all their own food for a year, sustainable living, permaculture, off the grid, living off the grid

Id: b3jNU7yDGRM

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 18 2021