One of your favorite garden flowers is quietly hiding an abundance of new life.
An avid gardener, Chloe Grayling (@lovechloejane), shared with TikTok how she turns one sunflower into 74,826 sunflowers.
@lovechloejane Replying to @S 🖤 unlimited sunflowers for life! #gardentok #growyourown #slowliving ♬ New Home – Frozen Silence
The scoop
“When your sunflower starts to look a little bit sad, you want to take it out and let it dry,” Grayling says.
She shows a sunflower with some withered and fallen petals. Make sure that the flower is extra dry so you can access its seeds, which are hidden under the middle of the sunflower.
To dry the flower, Grayling snips off the stem and puts the flower head in a brown paper bag, leaving it in there for a week. After one week, the flower should be dry and easy to work with.
The middle of a sunflower is made of many tiny tubular structures, known as disc florets, that contain both male and female parts. Each floret can self-pollinate, producing its own seed — what we recognize as sunflower seeds.
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To harvest these seeds, simply run your thumb over the disc florets — which should fall off easily when dried — revealing an abundance of seeds underneath. These seeds can be replanted in the spring to produce new sunflowers.
“Every seed is a new sunflower plant. Every plant can grow 20 or 30 more sunflowers. And every sunflower has 100 more seeds hiding away,” Grayling calculates.
How it’s helping
Some farmers and home gardeners buy new seeds every year. It allows them to vary their garden, following crop rotation practices, which improve soil health and disrupt crop pests without chemical use.
Some plants, like sunflowers, are endlessly abundant, providing many more new seeds for the next growing season. You could expand your garden by planting all the new seeds, which would yield even more when the new sunflower plants mature.
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At this rate, you would never have to spend money on sunflower seeds again, unless you want a different sunflower variety. Even then, you may be able to swap seeds for free in local gardening groups to share the abundance and source new varieties for your own garden.
Maintaining a garden and growing your own food is a great hobby that can improve mental health and daily diet. You can also save money on mass-produced, globally shipped produce at the store by growing your own, which tends to be more nutritious and better-tasting than store-bought food.
What everyone’s saying
The logical choice is to plant new sunflowers using the many free seeds that the sunflowers provide. However, some commenters have other plans for the seeds.
“I tried this but my father ate the seeds,” one commenter shared.
Another user suggested, “Toast the seed with salt and eat them.”
“I will definitely be following this!” a third commenter said.
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