Jeff Cassman

Sunflowers are still vibrant and healthy through August and September, into the early days of autumn. As they start to fade, prepare for ways to use the spent flower heads.

Sunflowers are not just beautiful, but they are beneficial, too. Once the beauty of your sunflowers fades, they can be used as future seeds, food and autumn decorations. Here’s how to harvest sunflower seeds, followed by five ways to prepare sunflowers once they have started to die back.

Harvesting the Seeds

If you plan to use the seeds for replanting or preparing for food, you will need to harvest and remove the seeds by cutting them back from the stalk once they have started to dry out. You’ll know it is time when the back of the flowerhead is turning yellow, most petals have dried up and fallen, and the seeds appear loose. If you want to speed the process up, you can cut bunches and hang them to dry.

De-seeding the sunflower is very simple if the flower is dried enough. Most seeds will be loose and ready to easily come away from the stalk. Firmly rub the seed head over a bucket to catch the falling seeds. Small blooms and other debris will also collect in the bucket.

Once you have completed this process with all your sunflowers, collect a colander or strainer to begin separating the debris. graja/Adobe Stock

Depending on the amount of debris, you will decide if shaking the seeds in the strainer is effective or if you will need to run water over them. If you choose to run water, you will need to make sure they spend adequate time in the drying process so no moisture creates mold and the integrity of the seed is not compromised. 

After separation, line a cardboard box or crate with newspaper or paper towels, and spread the seeds evenly in a single layer. They will need to dry a few hours or even overnight depending on how much moisture they have. 

Use Your Sunflower Seeds

Now that the seeds have been harvested, cleaned and dried, you can use them for the following purposes.

Replanting

Place the seeds you plan to replant next year in an airtight container. Label the container and store them in a cool, dark place. 

Roasting

Many people love to flavor and roast sunflower seeds. The large mammoth varieties are best for eating. Once the seeds are cleaned and dried you will want to: 

1. Boil the seeds in salted water to add flavoring. If you do not like salt, you can move straight to the final step. The ratio should be 1 cup seeds to 1 qt. water to 2 tbsp. salt.
2. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes.
3. Drain the water from the seeds.
4. Place the drained seeds in a single layer on…

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In my preparedness journey, I’m at a point where I have enough “stuff” and want to ensure that I have enough skills. As a prospective member of my county search-and-rescue (SAR) team and a budding hunter, one skill that I always wanted to learn was tracking. Sure, as a Boy Scout as a kid I learned some absolute basics, such as print identification for species of animals where I grew up, but I never got much further into it than that. While “read a book” is a valid path to prime the pump with many new skills, some things are better to learn in a class setting. So, when I saw that Fieldcraft Survival had not only added a tracking class to its inventory, but had scheduled one near me in Burnet, Texas, I jumped at the chance to get started. I signed up for Craig Caudill’s Tracking Fundamentals course in the Fieldcraft Survival headquarters store in Heber City, Utah, while on the way home from a family road trip.

Above: The Reveille Peak Ranch has a semi-outdoor classroom area where we initially met. It was nice to see a flag up to start the day.

Fieldcraft is a well-known brand with a wide variety of classes. This was my first time taking a class from them, however, so I was interested to see if it would live up to what I’d heard. I wasn’t disappointed.

The instructor for the class was none other than Craig Caudill, founder of The Nature Reliance School, who had been tapped by FCS to provide this content. Craig has written four books on wilderness survival topics and teaches tracking, among other things, through his school directly as well. So, I loaded up my day-in-the-sticks kit and drove out to Reveille Peak Ranch to start my journey towards becoming a tracker.

Getting Started

The class size was modest — about 10 people. Some people had taken several Fieldcraft Survival classes before; for others, this was their first. A few attendees were prior military service, others have always been civilians. To start out, Craig asked what we all hoped to get out of the class in order to tailor the approach, which I appreciated.

Above: The print has been identified and lines have been staked out to help determine key metrics about the track.

To be expected, a lot of people were there driven by their hunting passion. That was part of my purpose, but really tracking people to increase my skill set for SAR was my main driver. Luckily for me, much of the focus would be on man-tracking at first. This is because as people, it would be easier for us to make informed guesses about people tracks. It also doesn’t hurt that, as humans, we could create new human tracks rather than hoping to find animal tracks that may or…

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This will be an instructional/how to article, though I feel the need to set the stage first as to how I acquired the skills I write about and how I implement them regularly. Before attempting anything described in this article, check local laws and regulations.

Introduction

About fifteen years ago, when I was a younger man and had an answer for everything, I overheard some cowboys call their Queensland Healer dogs as “tools, not pets.” As I listened to and watched the cowboys work their dogs, I scoffed at their comments about their animals being tools. I looked at a friend of mine who was with me and said, “They’re comparing their horses and dogs to hammers and screwdrivers.” My friend and I laughed at our irrational comparison, looked once more at the cowboys and walked away. Though I had grown up in a small mountain town, most animals I knew of, be it dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, goats, etc., were all pets to their owners. Before that day, I had never heard of an animal referred to as a tool. Every animal I knew of had a name, a cozy bed, countless toys, and were typically talked to like a child.

It was not until I became an avid hunter, a federal trapper, a “homesteader”, a husband and father that I truly understood, and greatly appreciated, what those cowboys said years ago. I did not grow up in a hunting household, yet, from my earliest memories I yearned to be a hunter, a trapper, a mountain man. Even in my youth, I wanted the freedom to provide for myself, be it through trapping, hunting, fishing, gardening or trading for what I needed. I romanticized the idea of producing my own food and “bringing home the bacon” for a family that didn’t need anything I couldn’t provide or procure.

In my early twenties, I became an avid outdoorsman. I took the skills I acquired from my many years in Boy Scouts and improved on them, challenging myself to shoot better, to set up better camps, and to become a more confident man in the field which in turn made me a better man at home. At first, I had more struggles and failures, but as time went on, and after I was hired as a federal trapper, my skills greatly improved, making me a more successful outdoorsman, tracker, and hunter. I try to learn from my mistakes, failures and even successes to eliminate future unintended issues. As Mark Twain once said, “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.” I have devoted my life to education and learning how to give my family, and me, a better life; a step up from those around me who are content believing what they hear and following the crowd. I have never followed the crowd, hence why I became a trapper in the 21st Century.

As I mentioned, I spent my youth and early adult years in the Boy Scouts. I earned…

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