Who is not fond of a garden full of blooming sunflowers? These enhance the beauty of any garden, are good for insects and can even be eaten to improve health. There is no reason to not grow your own sunflower seeds and harvest the seeds for homemade sunflower seeds. Planting sunflowers is real fun and is often treated as a fun activity that your kids can help you with, as these need very little preparation time and are very easy to grow. If you are harvesting sunflower seeds for the first time, this is surely going to help you.
Make sure when you are getting your sunflower seeds that you pick ones that will grow into large flowers. You need to check the kind of seeds which are produced by the flowers, since sunflower seeds can be consumed by birds as well as humans. You have the option of picking from black, striped and white seeds when you are purchasing the sunflower seeds.
Choosing The Place To Plant Your Sunflower Seeds
When you are choosing a place for planting your sunflower seeds, you need to decide a place where it will get the most sunlight. Sunflower heads turns towards the east and you need to give these plants enough space to let them grow happily. While planting sunflower seeds and also purchasing these you need to consider their height factors. These grow well when planted in the borders of gardens and will amazingly enhance the look of your garden. These can be planted against the wall too which will give them ample protection from the wind, as they grow to enhance the look and appeal of your garden. You just need to ensure that the wall gets at least 6-8 hours of sunlight.
Preparing The Soil
Just like all other flowering plants, the soil will need a bit of preparation, though nothing elaborate. You can use a garden tiller to loosen the soil before planting these flower seeds. The soil needs to be medium rich; sandy soil is not ideal for sunflower plants as they need a good hold of the soil with their roots. Add organic manure or compost before planting these flower seeds. When you are planting these seeds, just ensure that these are adequately spaced, so that they are able to grow freely.
Preparing For Consumption
It is rightly said that ‘nothing lasts forever’ and this is true for these beautiful flowers too. After blooming for a few days and spreading smiles and happiness all around, sunflower heads slowly start bowing. Indeed a sad sight, but this is the rule of nature and we can do nothing about it! But, hold on, the process of preparing sunflower seeds to eat starts now so with sadness comes joy! As you notice the head has turned brown, you can slowly remove it for harvesting the seeds for roasting.
Before roasting these flower seeds you need to rinse these well and then get them completely dried. Once dried these can be roasted in preferably any iron skillet. They need to be cooked on medium heat while stirring continuously for 10 minutes with at least 5 pinches of Kosher salt.
How will you know that these seeds are done? Well – you will notice that the seeds have turned grayish white in color and you will get the sound of pebbles as you toss them in the pan. Once done these will get perfectly crisp and are going to be delicious!