How to Harvest Sunflower Seeds | Gardener's Path

12.06.2023 - 00:59 / gardenerspath.com / Laura Ojeda Melchor

Here’s a confession for you: even though I love them, I used to be too lazy to eat sunflower seeds. Unshelled ones, anyway.

All that work cracking them open just for a tiny slice of heaven inside? Not for me.

Or so I thought…

After enjoying the large, glorious yellow blooms of my very own sunflowers all summer long, I harvested my own homegrown seeds for the first time.

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Now I find eating unshelled sunflower seeds is an excellent way to keep my mind occupied when I’m on a long road trip.

And instead of reaching into a bag of store-bought seeds that are perched on the console, I’m delighted again and again by the plastic baggie filled with seeds from flowers that I grew and harvested myself!

In this article, you’ll learn how to harvest and enjoy your own homegrown sunflower kernels.

If you’re just getting started, check out our full guide to growing sunflowers in your garden.

Ready to harvest your own seeds and learn some tasty ways you can use them at home?

Here’s what I’ll cover:

Sunflowers brighten your garden with their cheery faces for several weeks in summertime, about 80 to 140 days after you sowed the seeds, depending on the cultivar.

And then they hang their heads, and their petals turn brown. They begin to shrivel and start to look dried out and dead.

But before they go, they have one last gift to share with you: a flower head full of ripe seeds.

Sunflowers, Helianthus annuus, like other members of the Asteraceae family, have complex reproductive structures. The center disk is made up of hundreds of tiny inflorescences, surrounded by large ray-like petals around the