It’s a rainy and windy (Halloween) day which means we’re spending the day catching up on farm work that we can do indoors. During this time of year, we have a lot of computer/paperwork, bill payments, invoicing, event planning, online content etc to do that doesn’t make the top of the priority list on nice weather days. On nice days, we are still working on garden cleanup, garlic planting (which hasn’t even been started yet), putting in our winter wood, putting things away for winter. It’s only a few weeks until the cows go into the barn and winter barn chores begin.
Christina has been harvesting seeds for months and most of it is tucked in baskets, boxes, buckets and paper bags awaiting the weekends and dark nights ahead. Today, she’s completing the final clean up step for one seed crop she’s been saving (and sharing) for a couple years now - her Autumn Beauty sunflower. She started by bagging the prettiest flower heads once they were done blooming so the birds wouldn’t eat them all. Then, she cut them and hung them in the greenhouse for a few weeks. Two weekends ago, she removed the seeds from the flower heads and put them in a bucket. The chickens found the leftovers and seed heads and have since devoured those. Yesterday, she used the wind to separate the little leftover bits from the seeds. She scoops the sunflowers a handful at a time into the air and drops them back into the bucket and the wind carries away all of the extra little bits that aren’t seed. Today, 5 months after she planted this year’s sunflower seeds, next year’s seed gets put into a glass mason jar where she’ll store them until spring.
In the spring, she plans to portion the sunflower seeds into packets and share them with people. Last year she gave away nearly 100 packets of seeds and we really enjoyed seeing people’s sunflower photos.
