Kara's Garden

I was always curious, somewhere in the back of my mind, of where sunflower seeds come from. I mean, to look at them- there's no fruit, and the sunflower heads are so big that it looks like it would only produce one big seed! Where do those little baseball game snack packs come from?

As I said in my previous post, sunflowers are actually lots of little flowers working together. The large sunflower itself is a composite flower, made of lots of little florets. The little florets inside the head are called disc florets, and they produce the sunflower seeds.

So, if this is true, I should be able to snack on my own sunflower heads, right? Tree Farm Bob said just to wait until they start to wilt, then rub the inside of the heads and the yellow florets would fall off, showing the seeds.

Once again, Tree Farm Bob is right! Here is a small flower, and you can see the black seeds showing through.

I had one large flower head, and I actually picked it a little earlier and let it dry in the barn for a few days (to protect it from the birds). Not sure if it made a difference in the number of seeds though- this flower came from a stalk with only one head, the other was one with multiple flowers. The stalks with multiples produce smaller flowers that (in my experience) don't last quite as long as the ones with one big flower. Most of the seed pods were fully formed on this one, but some were too small.

However, as you can see, after picking the sunflower clean, I have enough seeds for a nice snack! I don't think I'm going to eat these though. I'm going to dry the seeds out, then plant them. Imagine how many seeds I will have in my first crop! Now, if I can only get Carl to stop mowing behind the lake...