Hello Epic Gardeners welcome back this is Kevin from epic gardening

dot com which is your source for gardening information and today we have a question from

Johnny who says,

hey, I'm growing a sunflower in my front yard for the first time ever

and it's doing really, really well.

But I don't know when to harvest it and how to harvest it. I want to use the seeds for

salads and maybe to start new sunflowers, but I just don't know when to do it.

So can you help me out? Well, sure well sure Johnny that's what I'm here for

okay let's tackle that question in two parts the first one is when do we

harvest our sunflower seeds if you harvest before the right time you'll have a lot of seeds and shells, but the meat inside,

the nut meat or the seed meat inside won't be very substantial.

But if you wait too too long to harvest, the seeds will dry out and animals might start even

even start harvesting them for you, which is definitely not an outcome that you want.

So a good rule of thumb is to harvest

sunflowers when the petals become dry and begin to fall. The base of the head

will start to turn yellow and then start to turn brown.

And what you'll notice is that the seeds will sort of plump up and the seed coats will be

either black or with black and white stripes.

So that's the signal that you're looking for.

You're looking for plump seeds,

you're looking for the plant to start to die a little bit and that's when you'll know that it's ready to harvest.

Now how to harvest is a matter of personal opinion. A lot of people use a lot of different methods and I'll cover a couple of the most popular ones.

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