Guest guest Posted March 2, 2012 Report Share Posted March 2, 2012 -- A lot has to do with how much money you have vs. how much time you have and what that time is worth. If you dry the flowers upside down until dry - and it does take a bit - you do need to 'beat' them out of the head, but not so much as if you just have a bit of patience - Nature doesn't like to expend a LOT of energy when it comes to reproduction -- and sunflowers tend to not need hurricane winds to spread them -- though they do like birds to disperse them so they don't crowd each other out. I have found that simply wrapping the head and BEATING it on a small tarp does wonders -- then you simply use the side of a box and remembering back to day day when you used to be able to buy a 4 finger lid for $5-$10, simply use the same property of gravity to separate the seed from the chaff as we used back then. My bet is once you've done it, you could easily collect 20-40 pounds per hour -- that's a LOT of sprouts. AND a lot of dollars. The problem is really not that it's difficult - it's probably more that the didn't hang long enough and that our days are no longer structured around doing things like collecting seed for next year or for dinner in a couple of months -- one thing we did while listening to the radio, and later when we got enough money to put an antenna up in a tree - while watching TV -- was to crack walnuts and pick the seeds out with a seed-pick - and to husk almonds so we'd have nuts for a snack, breads, and, of course, cookies. We all move so fast these days we don't have time to save money. AND households are set up differently now. I'm lucky to still have a living room where nuts can be cracked on rounds of oak or pine - and an area where I can beat the bejesus out of some flowers to get the seeds -- and then use the chaff to re-start a fire and the stalks as kindling once the chaff caught on fire. Sometimes collecting seeds is not a lot of fun -- think pulling seeds out of tomatoes -- but Heirlooms would go away if no one had taken the time. I am one who finds mindless tasks like that a good time to let my mind wander and frees it so it can sometimes jump the rocks and gullies and road-blocks I put up when I think too hard on something. Just last night I was cutting a straight line into the receiver of a 'classic' shotgun -- a pre-war (WWII) Belgium Browning A-5. I've cut a straight line by chasing a graver with a hammer so many times for so many years -- at about 34 blows per inch I've probably laid down a mile or two of straight lines over the years, if not more -- and without a thought I did one last blow to make the line hit a screw-hole in the receiver dead center and make an absolutely clean bright-line into what was going to become an engraved screw head - and the graver simply slipped as I stuck it - and it flew through the hole, and across the palm of my hand before it came ti rest inside my hand. Dang! more than ouch! at the beginning. I STILL don't know how it happened -- but it's what people did before TV -- when they could listen to the radio and put together a jig-saw puzzle, build models, learn to whittle, all those things which are slowly disappearing from our lives -- not any fault of our own -- just that new technologies make us spend more time doing one thing than another. Just as I am doing now - or as I did when I was doing a bit of research when someone mentioned that they might not want a certain building block of life in their diet -- Lord Knows that we get plenty from so many other sources, yet some of the small variations on a major molecule can have tremendous health effects when taken in that particular form. Before now, I'd have saved it up for my 'weekend at the library' where I'd take all the questions I'd asked during the previous 2 or 3 weeks and go camp out at the library and find out the answers -- be it the libraby and stacks at my U, or at the library and stacks at a larger U -- now I can do that search in real-time from my home office! -- Just a change in allocation of time, and living in a world where I can do an on-line search and find an answer in less than a minute that used to take me up to a 4 hour drive and perhaps 2 hours looking through the bound indexes once I found the right library building to find the answer! -- and, yeah, I DID get a motel room and sleep over a couple of nights a month to research answers to questions in libraries -- just as other people would have spent their time doing other things - being volunteer firefighters, paramedics, reading teachers or tutors, taking photographs, going on pick-nicks, etc -- I set aside no less than one and no more than two weekends a month to 'live in the stacks' and learn stuff. Just because being curious was what I did - you have other things to do than collect seed, so you buy them. I do too. But I also save some -- why? Well some you can't buy anymore and I don't know where to get them -- others are just plain expensive -- and some is just because I can - and they DO make good bartering items -- how much is an egg plant from China that produces some of the most intense egg-plant flavor I've ever tasted worth?-- or the one called 'oyster plant' - it's a nearly no purple eggplant that tastes a LOT like oyster when baked - so I can make a mock oyster casserole out of some old egg-plant that was given to some relative back in the gold-rush days? I don't know -- but I trade them away every year with just a few plants for me -- And when I see wild-flower seed at over $300 an ounce -- YIKES! -- I'd hate to buy THAT seed by the ounce! - So yeah, there are a lot of reasons to not grow your own seeds - and then there's the feeling that you are eating the fruits of your own labor and not living off machines which --- well I'm no tree huger -- but I can argue that point too. I guess it all comes down to grandma - waste-not-want-not. Not exactly true, never was - but it does save me the cost of a winters supply of kerosene every year -- just in case the power DOES go out and I need night or heat in the hen-house I have some around that will keep them alive -- and some of the far reaches of my house in heat and light. And it's just a few packets of seed. only some seed. So it's not a big deal -- just calling folks mind to the fact that they can save some money on growing your own 'reseed' supply - heck, some years I'll buy tens of tons of seed when rebuilding an overgrazed ranch and tired land.... You are right -- some seed doesn't fall off the plant in packets, and some are very messy to get when they are 'ripe' enough to sprout -=- and nearly all seed needs to sit in water for a bit to soften up their coats so the plant hidden inside and break out and make a run for it! -- take care -- yeah, some seeds CAN be difficult to get out -- and other seed comes ready to bag, like Columbine. If you think sunflower is diffiuclt to get - just try some corn sometime! -- YIKES! No WONDER they made a special machine just for it! take care - paul -  Dream Well. Travel Well.  May you Walk Your Path in Beauty. " Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. " Carl Sagan. >________________________________ > >To: " sproutpeople " <sproutpeople > >Sent: Friday, March 2, 2012 2:37 PM >Subject: Re: Re: price comparison: sunflower seeds > > > >I DO grow my own sunflowers-LOADS of them, and while they are an absolute delight, I am here to tell you they are FIDDLY to extract the seeds from the heads. You have to dry them for quite some time, then plucking out the seeds from the seed head takes some serious effort-those seeds are in the head pod very tightly. GREAT container flowers, so certainly worth the effort, but don't think it is as easy as just shaking out the seeds. I still have many heads left from this past summer that I haven't chaffed yet-putting it off because it is so much work on the fingers, lol. > > > >Sent from my iPad > > > >> OR, novel concept -- grow a couple of your own 'sun flowers' they have them from a foot high or so, to the monsters we think of -- a single flower that cost you perhaps $1 over it's life time could yield many times that amount in 'keep back' seed. Just a thought here. -- paul - >> >> >> Dream Well. Travel Well. May you Walk Your Path in Beauty. >> >> " Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. " Carl Sagan. >> >> >________________________________ >> > >> >To: Tammie ; " sproutpeople " <sproutpeople > >> >Sent: Friday, March 2, 2012 1:23 PM >> >Subject: Re: Re: price comparison: sunflower seeds >> > >> >I have to chime in here re sunflower seeds. For me, the best seeds I have ever bought have been from the groups namesake - Sprout people. The seeds are super clean, with hardly any twigs and dirt among them, and very few broken/ damaged seeds as well. Truly quality items. And while you may pay a little more, it is well worth the quality of the item. I was reminded of this as I picking out twigs and broken seeds from a newly bought canister of sunflower seeds from Handy Pantry- when a sweet little flying insect made it's way out of the middle of the seed pile to say hello!!!!! It's back to Sprout people for sure for my next sunflower seed purchase!!!!!! >> >Sent from my BlackBerry® powered by Virgin Mobile. >> > >> > Re: price comparison: sunflower seeds >> > >> > >> > >> > >> > >> >Once the shipping is charged, which do you think is the best to order >> >from? I was placing an order with Handy Pantry last week but cancelled it >> >because the shipping was so high. >> >So, just trying to find out the best deals on all sprouts. >> > >> >Tammie >> > >> >** >> > >> > Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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