Harvesting Sunflowers

For a week and a half the mammouth sunflowers that were growing in the front yard garden boxes against the picket fence have been drying in the sun.  The heads were really big and spectacular this year.  The heat we had this summer must have pleased them. Since they were nice and dry it was easy to brush them off and begin to pick off the kernals.

Luke, my favorite four year old, came over to help.  We had an intellectual conversation about the firemen that came to his pre school today and the "doctor truck".  For those of you that do not know what a doctor truck is, it is an ambulance of course! I attempted to bring up a simple explaination of Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Mean but firemen were more interesting to Luke.

Haylee, Luke's eight year old sister and one of my BFF's, came by to see what we were up to.  She could see the patterns in the seeds and was quite excited by the idea that there was a pattern that gets repeated in nature.  We then practiced dehulling the seeds from the kernals with our teeth.  That lasted about 37 seconds because the kids did not think they were too tasty and the results were sparse.  Thnking I might still have an opportunity for a teaching/learning moment we paused and went inside to look up sunflower seeds in  wikipedia. 

In the end we filled two large stainless steel bowls with kernals.  The birds will be happy this winter.  We put the heads in the window boxes so that the birds and squirrels will be able to pick at them.  I thought the .window boxes looked  very fall like. I hate to see the end of this year's sunflower season  but I do love the Fall. 

We will save some seeds to plant next Spring and will look forward to watching them climb to the sun.  How many months away is Spring?