Growing Sunflowers for Seed

Finally I have had success growing sunflowers for seed – when I wasn’t trying!

Ten years ago I posted on my first attempts at growing sunflower seeds and have failed in my on and off attempts since then. This year I grabbed a punnet while I was at the garden centre and put them in a fairly inaccessible part of the garden just for the joy of seeing the sunny blooms and watching the bees and butterflies on them.

Imagine my surprise when I saw birds starting to feast on them and discovered that there were some plump seeds. I quickly put mesh bags over them and managed to get my first ever harvest.

I hung the flower heads to dry and then removed the seeds. Then came the extremely time-consuming part of cracking the shells to remove the inner seeds. I only had relatively few seeds but it certainly had me questioning whether it was actually worth it. If I had more seeds then I would certainly be investigating devices for shelling sunflowers.

With such a small harvest, I was determined to enjoy every seed, something more than just adding them to my morning granola. In the end I dry roasted them (in a frypan rather than the oven to minimise the chances of my burning them) and used them as a crunchy topping on some homemade hummus.