by Burton Dale

Created on: July 07, 2011   Last Updated: July 08, 2011

Growing sunflowers for culinary purposes gives the grower several options.  The easiest way to use this dynamo of nutrition and the quickest way is to grow sunflowers as sprouts which are eaten raw by themselves or incorporated into tasty salads.  It's easy!

You can also plant the seeds in soil to grow into flower heads that will provide yellow petals to place in salads as a garnish or you can use them as cut flowers for your table to eat with your eyes. If you have an oil press, you can even extract a wonderful oil from the seeds that is light and similar to olive oil. Sunflowers are eay to grow, but as they can reach up to twelve feet in height, they need to be planted in the ground rather than pots.  Almost any well drained soil will do, but water frequently if the soil becomes dry.  They appreciate  a little compost or a garden fertilizer to start them in life, and will take several months to flower. And here is how to start the seed for flower heads or for sprouts:

Soak the sunflower seeds in room temperature or warm water for no longer than eight hours. Do not soak longer or you can drown the seeds.  This method works equally well with either seeds with the shell on or with the shell off.  The seeds are now prepared for a number of options. 

If you plant them in soil, the soaking has given them a head start in life.  Make a three inch deep furrow and scatter a bit of vegetable garden fertilizer on the bottom. add an inch of compost or garden soil on top of the thin layer of fertilizer to prevent burning the baby roots, plant three seeds together about a foot and a half apart from the next three seeds and continue until you run out of furrow or row.  Cover with another inch of soil and after you add water along the row, you have planted the sunflowers!

Now to grow the sprouts, you have three options. You can place the soaked seeds in a jar, cover the open end with cheese cloth and rinse the seeds twice a day with warm, not hot water.  Drain all the water out to prevent mold with each rinse and in a couple of days the sprouts are ready to add to a salad.  Just be sure to eat them before there are a lot of roots.  They are still a bit nutty and will taste sweet. Place in salads, or you can add them to your bread dough.  They can also be ground to a paste and with a little yogurt added fermented a day or so into seed cheese.  Read Ann Wigmore's books for recipes.

If you want sunflower greens, take a plastic tray, add some peat which has had boiling water poured on it and allowed to cool. Be sure to squeeze out the excess water before placing an inch of peat in the tray. Any garden store should have peat.  I use the one from Canada.  Now sprinkle a layer of soaked seeds where one seed touches another, but is not piled up on each other.  Cover the seeded tray with wet newspaper and spray or mist daily until the sunflower plants sprout and begin to push up the newspaper.  Remove the newspaper, mist the sprouts to keep them damp, not wet.  Keep them in a sunny place, but do not let them dry out.  When they are green and three inches high, harvest them with scissors above the root line, rinse and they are ready to eat.

And that is how you can turn a handful of sunflower seeds into culinary delights that any parrot can tell you is a nutritious, tasty, and healthful food.  Maybe that is why some parrots live over a hundred years!  And don't forget that suflower seeds are very inexpensive and you won't have to take out a bank loan to add them to your diet?

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