How to harvest your sunflowers

When a sunflower bows its head to the ground, it is ready to harvest. The yellow petals around the edge of the sunflower will begin to wilt as well. This seems to be nature’s way of making any rain run right off the flower head (to stop the seeds from rotting) and also acts as a method of protecting the seeds from being eaten by birds (not that this stops them!)

We like to leave some seed for the birds to eat and then save the rest so that we can plant them again later in the year.

Once a sunflower has turned its face to the ground, you can dust off the florets off the face of the flower before you cut the sunflower head off the stalk.

Our Epuni farmers have been harvesting lots of seed heads recently. They cleanly cut the sunflower head off the stalk using secateurs. If it looks like there might be more flower heads that might still open on the stalk, they cut the flower head off carefully, so that these buds can still open and flower.

Once the flower heads have been cut they need to dry out, so that the seed can be safely stored over Winter. This is an important step so that they don’t rot over the winter period.

These sunflower heads have been drying in the sun for a couple of weeks, and are nearly ready to be stored. They make a lovely crunchy noise when they are handled, which lets us know that there’s not much moisture left in them.

Wednesday morning harvest at Epuni

The little farmers at Epuni harvested these superhugeginormous sunflower heads in the garden this morning, along with the biggest heads of broccoli I’ve ever seen – awesome!

Harvesting sunflowers with Epuni and Koraunui School students

Today we harvested sunflowers in our garden at Epuni School. We had some lovely visitors from Koraunui School (in Stokes Valley) to help us and they harvested the ultimate Valentine’s Day sunflower – a beautiful flower full of pink seeds! Check out the photos below to see how we spent the morning in the garden.

These sunflowers round the edge of the garden have almost finished flowering and are nearly ready to harvest.

Seeds peeping through:

Julia dusts off some of the florets from the face of a sunflower, to show the seeds hiding underneath. Julia taught the students that “when a sunflower bows its head to the ground, it is ready to harvest. We leave some seed for the birds to eat and then save the rest so that we can plant them again later this year.”

Students looking at the fractal pattern in a seed head:

Dusting off the florets to reveal the glossy black seeds underneath.

Beautiful farmers with their sunflower fractal.

Our Epuni farmers harvested some sunflower heads too. Sunshiney!

This is a super special sunflower… grown in the middle of the garden. Take a close look at the colour of the seeds…

.. it’s a magical pink sunflower, harvested on Valentine’s Day xxx

Proud farmers showing their freshly-harvested seed head.

Check out the range of colours of sunflower seed – we harvested pink, white and black seeds today!

After the students had harvested the seeds from the garden, they joined Julia outside the Sunshine House (the gorgeous painted tent you can see in the background) and learned about all the different types of vegetable seeds in the garden.

How are your sunflowers growing?

Tena koutou everyone! I can’t quite believe it’s nearly February already – January has just flown by. The Project Sunshine sunflowers in my garden are blooming beautifully so I thought I’d share a few photos with you. We’d like to start collecting photos of other Project Sunshine sunflowers growing in people’s gardens, so please email them to us at projectsunshineaotearoa@gmail.com or share a photo or two via FB and we’ll add them to our album.

These Giant Russians are growing out the front of my house. They didn’t grow very tall as the soil quality here isn’t great, but each plant has about 5 flower heads, which makes for an awesome display:

A Monarch butterfly feeding on a Giant Russian sunflower:

The Giant Russians in my garden out the back of the house grew much better, as they were planted in good soil with lots of compost, and are now over 10 feet tall! They have huge flower heads that the bumblebees love:

Another Monarch butterfly visitor:

As well as the Giant Russians, these ‘Evening Sun’ varieties popped up (in the foreground) – from the Project Sunshine ‘red’ blend I think. They’re a stunning variety as each plant is over 7 feet tall and has more than 10 flowerheads!

Here’s a bumblebee visiting a couple of ‘Evening Sun’ sunflowers. I love how the sunflowers have slightly different petal colours:

These red sunflowers are absolutely stunning too – I think these are the ‘Moulin Rouge’ variety. Like the ‘Evening Sun’ plants, these sunflowers are also about 7 feet tall and have 8-10 flower heads on each stalk:

A beautiful dark, velvety-red sunflower.

Sunflowers at Epuni School

A couple of weeks ago Catherine popped in to see how the sunflowers are growing in The Common Unity Project Aotearoa garden at Epuni School. Leila was working hard in the garden in very blustery weather. Despite all the Wellington wind this summer, the sunflowers still look amazing and there are many more buds to open. We put these photos up on Facebook, but thought we’d also share them here.

Beautiful flowers edging the garden:

Some of the Giant Russians in flower:

This is the centre of the mandala garden, with the bunting flapping in the wind:

Check out the size of this flower head – those are 7-year-old Olly’s hands holding it!

Some beautiful ‘Evening Sun’ flowering on the left. They have many flower heads per stem:

An Evening Sun flower in full bloom:

There are sunflowers dotted throughout the garden:

Can you spot our friend the bumble bee?

Sunshine Day at the Dowse – Sunday 24 November 2013

Hello lovely sunshiney people!

Come and celebrate sunflowers, our communities and bees with us this Sunday. Our Sunshine Day is at the Dowse Art Museum in Lower Hutt from 10.00 – 11.30am.

Our Sunshine Mobile is stacked with sunflower seeds and seedlings, which will be available to take home for a gold coin donation – including our special limited edition ‘mystery seeds‘.

If you bring along an empty milk bottle, we’ll show you how to make it into a handy watering can. You can also make your own beautiful bee sticker, string together an awesome Project Sunshine necklace, colour in a sunflower page, chalk up the pavement and take part in other fun craft activities.

If the weather is lovely we will stay on longer outside under the trees with art activities, picnic blankets and maybe even some cake!

We’d love to see you on Sunday, so please come and say hi 🙂

Project Sunshine in the Gulf News

Thank you Phil and Tanya from Waiheke Island, for featuring us in the amazing children’s page ‘Imagined Worlds’, in the Gulf News. You can read the full text of the children’s page below.

It is pretty special that our seeds have travelled all the way up the country to Waiheke Island, where they’ll be grown in the community Food Forest. We hope the sunflowers bring a golden glow to the garden there, and look forward to hearing how they go.

Grow well little seeds!

Sunshine goodness in the Dominion Post

And today we’re in the Dominion Post newspaper! Please do get in touch if you’d like any packets of seed.

Sunshine Day – Tuesday 1 October

If you’re in Wellington next Tuesday, come and join us during the school holidays for a little bit of sunshine fun with our farmers.

We’re going to plant lots of sunflowers around the neighbourhood! Beautiful environments help create abundance and increase our well-being. Our farmers also get to help their little superhero friends: the bees. We’re going to meet at the Epuni School garden at 10am.

Keep an eye on our Facebook page if the weather looks like it might not be sunshiney. We’ll post an update on Tuesday morning.

Please also get in touch with us if you would like some of our sunflower seeds for community plantings. We welcome any koha that you might be able to offer – and any financial contributions will go towards set-up costs for school beehives.

Thanks to our little farmers too, for their beautiful ‘colouring in’ artwork on our posters xx

The bee’s knees

When we first started Project Sunshine, the children who planted sunflowers noticed that the golden flowers attracted lots of bees. Their discovery then led to many discussions about the importance of bees and what we can all do to encourage them in our neighbourhood gardens.

‘Helping the bees’ is now an important part of Project Sunshine. We appreciate the important work they do and want to teach others about the world’s most important pollinator too!

Here are fascinating bee facts:

• About one third of everything we eat is pollinated by bees. Many of our crops would not be viable without bee pollination. Both honeybees and bumblebees are important pollinating insects.

• Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.

• Honey bees transform nectar, a sweet substance secreted by flowers, into honey by a process of regurgitation and evaporation. They store it as a primary food source in wax honeycombs inside the beehive.

• To make honey, bees drop the collected nectar into the honeycomb and then evaporate it by fanning their wings.

• There are three types of bees in the hive: queen, worker and drone.

• Workers live about 45 days in the summer, while drones are driven out of the hive in Autumn. Queen bees can live for up to five years.

• The queen may lay 1,500 or more eggs each day during her lifetime. This daily egg production may equal her own body weight. She is constantly fed and groomed by attendant worker bees.

• A bee’s wings beat 190 times a second, that’s 11,400 times a minute – this creates their distinctive buzz.

• Honey bees are the only bees that die after they sting.

• Honey bees have five eyes: three small ones on top of the head and two big ones in front.

• Bees communicate with each other by dancing and using pheromones (scents).

• Bees can count to four.

Over recent decades there has been a noticeable decrease in worldwide bee populations. In some places in the world, bees are simply disappearing. This is known as Colony Collapse Disorder. There are many different theories as to why this is occurring, but we do know there are a few things we can do to support bees, and they are simple:

• Stop the use of pesticide sprays in our gardens. They not only kill bees, but also disorientate them, making it hard for them to return to their hives.

• Plant plenty of food for them. Bees need flowers to forage, all year round. Flowers are not only great for bees but they make us feel good too! Click here to see a great list of other bee friendly flowers you can plant. 

• Respect them. Our little friends the bees should not be feared. Once we appreciate the important work they do for us and how much we rely on them, the bees will be much better off. And so will we!