Saving Titan sunflower seeds

A Baseball players guide to eating and saving sunflower seeds.

Launch Gallery

This hebdomad at Heritage Farm in Decorah , Iowa , we ’re harvesting sunflower . This has some of us question about the whole sunflower source clientele . Of course here at Seed Savers , we harvest cum to grow , but we ’re curious about those who harvest seed to eat . Which brings us to baseball , where actor manducate sunflower seed has become a omnipresent part of the plot .

If you ’ve watch a major conference baseball game game recently , it ’s obvious seeding has put back chewing tobacco as the levelheaded plug of choice . In a single season , the Cleveland Indians will go through 12 cases of helianthus germ . The Detroit Tigers have a“Who like sunflower seeds?”discussion on their forum . Here devotee contend the best brands for feeding , the virtues of BBQ and Ranch flavor , and diagram how to slip semen from their wife ’s prime beds . EvenThe Washington Postdevoted an intact feature film to the classical shuttlecock food,“The Great Sunflower Seed Shortage of 2005 . ”

For baseball players , sunflower seeds have replace tobacco . But this furore is nothing new . North and South American Indians have used mature sunflower leaf as a tobacco substitute for hundreds of year . Helianthus annuusis aboriginal to North America , and many of these sure-enough variety are still around . The Tarahumara White Sunflower was originally grown in the Sierra Madres of Northern Mexico . The Arikara Indians in the Dakotas , and the Seneca Nation in New York , grew self - entitle varieties that are now propose commercially .

helianthus history

WhenHelianthusfound its means across the Atlantic , Russians begin to grow sunflower seeds commercially for their oil . And like many seeds here at Heritage Farm , Modern varieties ofHelianthuseventually made their style back to North America from all corners of the world : Mammoth Russian and Rostov from Russia , Taiyo from Japan , Italian White , Hungarian Black Seeded , and an old Turkish variety called Supermane , to name a few . ( tap the connection to viewall Seed Savers sunflower potpourri . )

This week , the garden crew harvested their way of life through a jungle of Titan sunflowers , a seed we delineate in our catalog as : “ One of the tallest - grow , biggest - headed and largest - seeded varieties uncommitted to gardener . This is one for impressing your neighbors and winning honour at county carnival . ” And the cogent evidence was in this Titan forest the garden crew was clear - slip .

When and How to Harvest Sunflower Seeds

helianthus are ready to reap when the back of the flower has turn white-livered , which is not so easy to determine when sunflowers are 14 feet in the melody . After duple check to verify there are no co - workers standing behind , the gang will pull on the stalk until it snaps . Once it flick the weight of the flower head take over and timbre ! The jumbo head is then cut off with a pair of loppers , collected on a flatbed , and engage back to the eminent tunnels to dry out .

Next calendar week we ’ll be dry seed . Out in the field , the garden gang hired man - picked the big flower heads with the most beautiful ejaculate for seed stock . We ’ll make unnecessary this seed to originate next year . Part of the stem was leave on these flower heads so that we can hang them to dry . The hundred or so remaining heads are circulate out on a screen . It ’s essential to maintain uninterrupted gentle wind rate of flow , so that the flower head do n’t rot . But the fully grown challenge to drying sunflower seed is keep mice and birds away . We keep birds away by fill in the drying outgrowth indoors . Unfortunately for us , the same time of year to harvest sunflowers is also the same time of year mouse are try out to find their way of life indoors . Setting traps help , but only if you’re able to bait them with something they like more than helianthus seeds ( which they love ) . We use raisin , a fruity enticement that seems to solve .

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