I knew when my sunflowers bloomed that I wanted to harvest some seeds at the end of the growing season. I planted a packet of mammoth sunflower seeds at back in June and it took a while for them to germinate and grow. I only got around ten of them to grow. I planted most of them in our corn patches so they grew tall alongside our silver queen and ruby red corn. I also planted a few in the pumpkin patch. It took so long for the sunflower seeds to germinate and grow I thought they were all duds until one day "surprise" there were sunflowers!

Sunflowers with my corn

My pride and joy 9 footer with one huge sunflower

Now that the weather is finally fall-like my sunflowers are dying off. Instead of letting them rot, I've decided to cut the flowers off the plants and try to harvest their seeds.

Harvesting sunflower seeds is extremely easy and fast. The first step is cutting the flower off of the plant so you can work with it. I waited until my flowers had wilted or the petals had died off.

This was a big sunflower!

Big As My Kid's Head!

See all that yellow in the middle of the next picture? Rub it off with your fingers. It comes off easy. It's where the pollen use to be. Rub it all over and it will fall off with ease and reveal all those lovely seeds.

Look at all those seeds!

To get the seeds off, simply pick a few off with your fingers and then rub your fingers around over them and they'll fall off with ease.

This one big flower had tons of seeds. I'm letting them dry out and will store them in a ziplock bag in the fridge or freezer until next spring. Hopefully, I'll have hundreds and hundreds of sunflowers next year in the yard. I love mammoth sunflowers so much. They are so pretty to see.