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I've mentioned many times how much gardening is good for the soul. It's relaxing and satisfying to see all your hard work bloom into beautiful flowers or turn into food you can eat. This year my garden was focused on producing fruits and vegetables. Flowers are nice and pretty to look at but they aren't as useful as spending my energy on food producers. That's why I only planted sunflowers and a few other kinds of flowers that attract useful bugs to the garden.

Sunflowers are great because they produce lots of seeds and those seeds can be used for next years garden or for eating. In the dtube video above you can watch me harvesting my sunflower seeds and enjoy the calmness of the project. It's fun seeing how many seeds come from one giant sunflower!

Eating Fresh Sunflower Seeds

You can eat sunflower seeds in a variety of ways. Once harvested from the flower, like in the above video, you can let them dry out over the course of four days. Once dried out you can eat them raw or you can cook them. It's not recommended you eat the outer shell of the seeds because they can cause constipation or shards of the shell can scratch your insides like your stomach lining.

If you eat them raw, take the shell off and enjoy! If you want to cook them there are lots of recipes out there where you can spice up your seeds and roast them. I enjoy sunflower seeds with just salt. Simply soak the seeds overnight in a bowl of saltwater then the next day drain and dry the seeds and pop them in the oven for thirty minutes at 300 degrees. Alternatively, you can choose other spices to roast your seeds with like cinnamon or paprika.

Sunflower seeds can also be used as an ingredient in other dishes. Cookies, granola bars, breads, and more. It's an amazing little seed and you can do a lot with them. You can even make a peanut butter alternative called sunbutter which is ground up sunflower seeds mixed with coconut oil, salt, and sugar substitute.

My harvested seeds

Very Relaxing Hobby

Growing sunflowers is super relaxing for me. I grew mammoth sunflowers which are the huge ones that get up to 12 feet tall. I found a lot of enjoyment going out everyday to see the plants getting taller and taller and taller. It was like a game to see how big they could get. My biggest hit 12 feet tall.

Cutting Down My Plants To Harvest Seeds

Harvesting the seeds was a lot of fun and relaxing. Just seeing those seeds come out of their little pocket spaces was fascinating to watch. For me harvesting seeds was relaxing because I got to see more and more seeds pile up so that I had hundreds and hundreds of seeds. Saving them in a zip lock bag in the freezer for next year, I envision a very large sunflower patch next summer in my garden.

If you grow sunflowers you get food and happiness all in one little seed.

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