Blog Update!
For those of you not following me on Facebook, as of the Summer of 2019 I've moved to Central WA, to a tiny mountain town of less than 1,000 people.

I will be covering my exploits here in the Cascades, as I try to further reduce my impact on the environment. With the same attitude, just at a higher altitude!

Thursday, August 23, 2007

A week (or so) of crops

Tarahumara sunflowerI haven't been posting too many pictures of my "crops" lately. Mostly because I've been lazy. But, I went out on a photographic journey of sorts and catalogued crops that were of note.

So, today begins a tour of my crops. I'll be posting pictures and waxing poetic about each one.

By the way, I'm on vacation for the next week, so that's why you're getting such exciting crop information.

Anyway, to start you all off, I planted Tarahumara Sunflowers in the spring. Some of them grew to over 9 feet tall and some of them, well, are still about knee-high. I can't explain why that is so. But the ones that have bloomed so far are beautiful and, once the seeds are ready, I'll leave some for the birds and save some for eating.

They really are cheerful and, mostly importantly, super easy to grow.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice photo! Do the seeds need a lot of "processing," besides just being shelled, in order to use them? Do you think you'll try to press oil, or is that difficult?

Frisky said...

it's almost too yellow. beautiful!

Anonymous said...

That sunflower is beautiful. I love growing sunflowers, but I'm in Australia and its the end of winter. In a month or so I'll be planting my sunflowers. In the past I've just collected seeds for growing the next year and given the rest to the birds. But I've recently been trying to buy sunflower seeds to put in muesli and they were grown in China, so I didn't. Then I remembered all those seeds I grow myself. I've never tried eating them because it would take so long to shell enough.

How do you shell them? Is there an easier way than with your fingers?