How to Grow Sunflower Sprouts: Easy, Fun, Delicious, Free

 

 Some years ago, I went to Casa Nueva in Athens, Ohio, with my friend Mimi. Mimi knows all the best things in Athens. "I always order this salad, just for the sunflower sprouts," she enthused. I love sunflower sprouts."
Of course, I ordered the same salad, and plowed into a big pile of delicate sprouts. I adore them, too. I could eat them every day.

"Why don't I sprout sunflowers?" I mused aloud.

"I used to do it, all the time," Mimi replied. "When we were all living in a group house, you know." I smiled. I could see the scene. Buncha longhair musicians, growin' their own sprouts, eatin' government tofu.

That was all the encouragement I needed. I went home and started experimenting. First, I went to the store and bought organic sunflower hearts for snacking, thinking that would get me the cleanest sprout. I put them on damp paper towels to see if they'd grow. And they sat there, grew mold and rotted. Rats!!

I'm not sure, but they may have been heat-treated. They may have been labeled organic, but those seeds were dead. Come to think of it, hulled sunflower seeds taste dead to me. Back to the drawing board.

I went out to the garage and got a couple handfuls of black oil sunflower seeds from the wild bird seed bin. I put about an inch of vermiculite in a shallow plant saucer, pressed the seeds into it, watered and voila! A day later they were starting to sprout. Sunflowers sprout and grow at a dizzying pace. You can have edible sprouts within a week.

Nowadays, I use clean Pro-Mix potting soil. I press the seeds into about an inch of soil, cover them lightly with more soil,  and keep the soil moist but not inundated, as the big plant saucer has no drainage holes. Within a week, I'm harvesting delicious sunflower sprouts.

However,  I have to grow them indoors. The chipmunks get them immediately, even on the top shelf of a baker's rack.

 

Who, me? 

With the last batch, I thought I'd outsmart the chipmunks, so I put my saucers on 3' high pedestals outside, in the open, with nothing a chipmunk could jump from nearby. The next morning, every single sunflower seed had been dug out. No chipmunk can get on a 3' pedestal, and a bird won't dig. Chipmunks climb very well, but they can't jump for crap. I could only conclude that a flying squirrel had found them in the night, because they were fine at sundown and gone in the morning. I got a good laugh out of that. It's always somethin' around this place!

The perp. Taken on my back deck railing. Gawww I love flying squirrels.

Ain't no stopping a flying squirrel. It's an honor to have them clean me out. I pray they never get a taste for the Achimenes rhizomes the chipmunks love so much, because I'm really screwed then. My chipmunk-proof growing table will do me no good at all. Please, little hanky squirrels, no.

 I gave up entirely trying to grow them outdoors, and I'm producing them in the living room now, next to the deck door, where they'll get some light. Hey. That's why they call it a living room. Mine is anything but formal.

 

To harvest, I use a scissors to cut them off at soil level.

 

 

 I like to harvest them just after they cast off their seed shells, and before the first true leaves appear. 

Phoebe and I love to sit and twiddle off the seed shells, but if you wait a few days, they'll cast them off naturally.

Once you've harvested them, there might be a modest second wave of sprouts, but I'll compost these sad little stumps today and start over with fresh soil. I do hate cutting off seedlings; it feels wrong to me.  But I get over it because I love eating them! YUM!

 

Being alive, sunflower sprouts keep beautifully in a Ziploc in the fridge, and are fabulous on salads and BLT's. And live sprouts are the best, most satisfying, healthy snack ever!  

I've held onto this post long enough to show you the second wave. Here's the second cohort, photo taken August 4--only three days after planting. They were ready to harvest by Aug. 6.  I used even less soil than last time--barely an inch. And I put more seeds in, almost covering the soil with them.

 

 I can tell you that you can't re-use the soil, because when you upend it to dump it, you find it's a solid living mass of white roots from all those beheaded seedlings. So dump it, wash the saucer and start with fresh soil. 

Like container-grown lettuce, (my other obsession) sunflower sprouts are a fabulous free food you can grow year-round. You don't need to live in the country or even need to have a garden to grow them.  You don't even have to have a sunny window. Any window will do. Heck, they'd sprout in total darkness. Do it! Homegrown is always way better than anything you could buy. 

Tower room lettuce, Earth Day 2018. Alive, clean, salmonella free. And so much better than storebought. Now this, you do need sun to grow. But sunflower sprouts, anyone can grow, anywhere.

 

 This has been a PSA from Indigo Hill, where we know that all the best things in life are free.

Earth Day, Every Day

It's raining this morning. The continual soft patter of drops on the roof and windows is the Lord's way of telling me to sit down, for once. Take a load off, do something other than dash around, muttering, hauling the garden cart behind me, full of tools and piles of weeds and bags of bulbs needing to be planted. Steady rain is the only thing that will send me indoors in late April.

 

A quick, unsolicited and unpaid ad here: If you're looking for garden gloves, look no farther than Foxgloves. They fit like a second skin, breathe like nitrile gloves don't, and protect my hands from rocks and dirt and drying. This time of year, I automatically put them on whenever I head outside, so I'll be ready to pull weeds and grub around in the soil.  Never walk by a weed, that's my credo, and it keeps my gardens pretty clean. 

They wear like iron. Yet they're sensitive enough to use for planting. Amazing! I finally wore through the fingertip of my green pair after more than a decade. When I'm finally through gardening for the day I just wash my hands with soap and water while wearing them, remove them and squeeze them out, then lay them in the sun to dry so they're clean and ready for tomorrow. Best of all, they now come in Virginia bluebell blue!! Hello, Mother's Day gift! Get them here.

Those of you on Facebook (stay with me here, even if you aren't) will be familiar with the occasional "challenge" that goes around like a a flu bug several times of year. In the one most frequently aimed at me, people tag you (a way of getting your cyber-attention) and "challenge" you to post a nature photo every day. Um. Wut. I do that anyway. That's all I do on Facebook. I post nature photos every day. So...the challenge is to, what...post a better nature photo every day? A more naturey nature photo every day? Or are we just not thinking about this when we challenge a naturalist/photohound to post daily photos of nature?

That's kind of my first, gut reaction to Earth Day. I'll be making the rounds of my bluebird boxes or down on all fours, grubbing in the actual earth, when it hits me that humans have declared April 21 to be "Earth Day." The day we all talk about saving the planet. And I'll smile and remember back to the first Earth Day in 1970, what a big deal it was, and remember when the James River in Richmond, VA, when I was twelve, literally stank and foamed brown with pollution; when ospreys and eagles were so decimated by DDT that the females couldn't set their eggs without cracking them, and I realize that humans designating a day to talk about taking action to save the planet is important. It's important, like the massive bald eagle nest, stuffed into a powerline support, that  I saw from the bridge the last time I drove across the James River. It's important, like the osprey parachuting in to a nest full of healthy chicks on a channel marker in the Chesapeake Bay. I think about all the birds I thought I would never see, when I was twelve, and all around me I could see and smell the effects of humanity collectively soiling its own nest.

Coming of age in Richmond in the 70's was tough. The bulldozers were so busy making small roads into highways; wildlife habitat into shopping centers; leveling every patch of woodland and old farm and orchard that I and the wild things needed to survive. All I wanted was to get out of there, for they had left nothing for us. As I think about it, coming of age in Richmond has a lot to do with why I've stuck myself way out here in Appalachian Ohio, on the way to nowhere. And then I smile and shake my head. There's no getting away from humans and their nest soiling, especially when you live on top of the Marcellus Shale. However.

There are many things that have gotten so much better, since we started paying a little more attention to people like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson. I think about Earth Day and smile. There is so much more work to be done. And this is the day we have designated talk about it. To plant some trees. To take children out into the field. And that's a good thing.  Then I go back to what I was doing, which generally has something to do with making this patch of earth friendlier for wild things. Spreading the welcome mat. Making an offering to them. Doing what I can here, now. When the larger world around you seems to have gone insane; when truth is called lies and lies are treated as truth; doing what you can here, now, is the only way I've found to hold on. Doing.

To-do lists are a vital mental anchor for me. This was yesterday's. If you're not hearing from me much, this is why. This list is late April for me in southeast Ohio.  I'm not talking; I'm at a flat-out gallop, dodging the rainy days, trying to get the living things taken care of on their immutable timetable, before I take off to distant places to... talk about it all.

I wanted to give you a taste of Earth Day on Indigo Hill. I was thrilled to see a sunrise after so many weeks of rain and clouds. I headed out toward it, like a moth, then thought to spin around and see what it was doing to the Big Red House. Oh!!

 

The old pear was lit from behind and within by the rare sunrise. A shelf of clouds waited to gobble the sun up, but I caught a little glow. 

The pear tree's awake.

Fruit good only for ferment

I've no use for that.

Its tall stately form

Great piles of ivory blossoms
Now those, I can use.  

 

A tire still hangs from its lowest branch, mostly for remembrance.

 

  Entirely for remembrance. Nobody around here swings on tires any more. We're all too big now. Even that little flame-haired elf would need to be wary of the old, rotted rope.

 

I've mashed together April 20 and 21 into a single Earth Day post, because that was when I finally got around to checking all couple dozen of my far-flung bluebird boxes. 

There were some lovely surprises waiting, better than Easter morning. 

Paas makes a nice turquoise, but it's not as nice as the one Mrs. Bluebird makes with her own bile. Bluebird egg blue is its own miracle.

A typical Gilbertson PVC box first clutch of four.

The very first box I opened on Earth Day was a wooden box, and it had a full clutch of five. Any more, five-egg clutches are a rarity in my boxes. I think it may be because the boxes are small--mostly round Gilbertson style PVC--and the birds adjust brood size so they won't be so crowded in them. I'm going to pay closer attention, and see if I get more five-egg clutches in my wooden boxes. 

 

You can just barely see in the photo below that the base of the nest is made of maple petioles. Those are the stalks of maple flowers, and they are bright red when fresh. I know who made this nest. It's the same female who nested here last year. She's new to the box. 

 

I knew right away I had a new female in 2017, because her nest style and material selection was different from that of the bird who'd nested there for at least four years previously.  Here's her nest from May 4, 2017:

 

It's the most beautiful bluebird nest I'd seen. It was a like a layered cake. A Carolina chickadee had started it, with fresh green moss and bark fiber and fur, and this little gal took over with red maple petioles, dry grass and pine needles. And then she laid five perfect, dark-blue eggs. Just like she did this year.  

There were other reasons I knew this was a new tenant in the Church box. The former hen laid very pale blue eggs. And usually, all but one or two would be infertile. So years would go by with broods of one or two chicks. I'm not sure why this was. Perhaps her mate was infertile, and the fertile eggs resulted from extra-pair copulations by the female. In other words, she may have had to go find a fertile male in order to have any success at all. It seems to me that if a hen consistently lays eggs, most of which are infertile, but then always has one or two that are fertile, the problem may lie with her mate. We know that bluebirds, like many species that we believe to be monogamous, sneak around on each other, seeking mating opportunities with neighbors. I may have been seeing evidence of this in the single fertile egg in each clutch.

Whatever her problem, this benighted female either passed on or changed territories, and we were in full productivity mode again. 

I was so excited to find a full clutch of beautiful blue eggs from the petiole-fancying bluebird that I showed them to the woman who was carefully mowing the cemetery lawn.  I wanted to see her face light up when she saw them, too. And it did!

 

I put the nest back in its box, and watched her get off the mower and pick up a small American flag in her path. She shook it out, dusted it off, rolled it up, and stashed it for safekeeping as she mowed. There was a reverence in those small actions that moved me.

When I got home, I checked the driveway boxes. The one up on the right bank had treasures. Even cooler was the fact that the nest was made up largely of deer hair. 

I wondered if the hair could be Ellen's, as this is where I'd found her two Novembers ago. 

 You can be sure, since there is so much of it, that the bird got the hair from a carcass. Hair doesn't biodegrade very quickly; it lies at the kill site for many months.  As I thought about it, this nest could well be constructed of Ellen's hair.  For more on Ellen, click here: Fair Ellen: A Remembrance.

 

The thought pleased me, that my sweet crooked doe might have left something behind, that wound up cradling blue eggs and nestlings. And the wheels, they go 'round and 'round.

I am always pleased when my kids point out things they've found. Liam called me to the deck railing to identify an unusually large bird dropping. Squee!

A good inch long it was. And there was an identical one, but dried up, presumably from the same bird, from yesterday. I just realized, looking at this photo, that it even lies at the same angle, and at the precise same distance from the railing's edge. Same bird, much? Situational awareness, people!

 

I was happy to be able to tell Liam this was left by a mourning dove who had been sitting for a long time on its eggs. I can't specify the sex, because both sexes of mourning dove take long shifts on the nest. While sitting, they don't defecate, so when they finally do leave to grab a bite, they make these marvelous compacted bird-turds an inch long, with maybe four poops-worth of droppings in one tidy packet.  I wouldn't know they were made by a dove unless I'd raised several. One becomes intimate with droppings when raising birds.

'Tis the season for marvelous bird droppings.

Speaking of marvelous, that second planting of Buttercrunch lettuce I started in March has really kicked in. As the plants I'd started in October 2017 finally began to bolt after feeding us all winter, I pulled them, one by one, and planted new seedlings amongst them,  adding a couple inches of aged cow manure to the containers as I went. There was never a break in the continuum of delicious lettuce. On this Earth Day, I filled my shirt with huge, impossibly tender leaves. I head up to the tower room to pick every other day, and Liam and I gorge on salad with homemade tahini dressing every night. We can barely keep up, and we're totally spoiled by the safe, clean organic greens coming out of the tower. Container-grown lettuce--it's the only way to go. You should try it! Anybody can do it, anywhere, given good sun. And when spring finally comes, I'll move them outside on the front and back porches, where they'll get partial sun and be protected from baking and bunnies. A little shade makes much nicer, thinner, sweeter leaves. Elevation foils rabbits and slugs.

Anyway, there you have it, a grab-bag of thoughts inspired by realizing it was Earth Day as I walked from one bluebird box to the next, breathing in sweet balmy spring air and feeling indescribably grateful for everything I get to see, do, and witness out here in the middle of nowhere, on the way to nothing.

August Rocks: Garden Tour 1

The August cooldown is here. A Canadian air mass is holding sway and the air smells of hay and sweet wine. 

I took a garden tour last night after spending much of the day mowing, raking, weeding, and preening my flower beds. I don't do a lot of preening. There's too much of the other stuff to be done. 

I'm celebrating right now because I am no longer in pain. I returned home from New England to find two weeks' worth of grass growing wild on a saturated lawn. It had rained for most of the time I was away. I mowed it into soggy windrows, the mower gagging on the clumps, and Liam and I raked the whole damn yard the next day, after the sodden green wad of clippings had had a chance to not dry overnight. It was like raking wet cow manure. My lower back went into spasm from overuse and stayed that way for almost three weeks. Oddly enough, getting in and out of my car was the most painful thing I had to do. I'd sit and think about how I was going to complete the maneuver for about 30 seconds, then begin the process. I felt 100 years old. Having a complaining back affects almost everything you want to do. I send this message of hope out to back pain sufferers everywhere. It does heal. I mean, an overuse injury does. I also give you this link to Lawrence Gold's simple floor exercises which Liam and I did together. Not surprisingly, he healed a lot faster than I did. These exercises sped the process for both of us, for sure.

Anyway. Pain is boring. I wanted to take you on a little garden tour because the rain that brought the pain has also brought such beautiful flowers to my gardens.  We'll start at the front door.  I'm happy with this hanging basket. Supertunia "Honey" is finally showing some good color after being a bit bleached out for most of the summer. 

I don't think I bought a single lobelia plant this year. They're all seed volunteers from various planters and pots in the greenhouse, carefully picked out and nurtured in separate pots when they volunteer. That's how I roll--scrounging and saving, getting as much as I can for nothing.  I did buy some seeds of multicolored lobelias and was happy to get this one. I was going for the dark amethyst but the rabbits ate most of them to the ground. There's a theme here. If I want to grow rabbit candy, I have to elevate it.

The Achimenes are FINALLY blooming. They got a very late start thanks to freaking chipmunks (I'm looking at YOU, Tilda Sixbuttons!!) 

who climb my bonsai shelves and dig up the rhizomes to eat. Then they chew up the plants just to make sure everything is completely dead. 

I had this beautiful scheme this year to grow Pink Nighty plants for sale at the Marietta Farmer's Market. I had long planters all planted with my best rhizomes, saved back from being sold at my talks (I sold a passel of 'em this spring!). And chipmunks ate all but about 13 rhizomes. I know now I'll have to start them inside next year. I'm thinking about using the glassed in tower room as a sort of auxiliary greenhouse for such tender n' tasty things, when it's gotten too hot and sunny to have them in the greenhouse proper. 

This is "Pink Nighty," and man, oh man is it pink. Shocking Pink Nighty. The iPhone exaggerates, and takes away some of the nicer coral tones, but it is that bright!

I just love this little gesneriad. Adore it. And am so happy to finally have some abloom on the benches. I don't dare put them on the front porch. Tilda will definitely devour them, if Notch the bunny doesn't get there first. 

A chipmunk-planted black-oil sunflower came up amongst the evening primroses in the front bed. It's too tall for the front but it's so charming I let it stay. 

A first for me: Fuchsia magellanica, native to temperate parts of southern South America, and hardy in Ohio, started blooming in July! It usually waits until September. Don't know why, just grateful. And Hosta "June" is incredibly late to bloom, so I have this probably unrepeatable combo going in the front shade bed. Hummer heaven!

I absolutely love having a hardy fuchsia around. So durable, too. And it roots from cuttings in plain  water. What's not to love?

Moving on out from the front door, Chet pauses to make sure he is in the photo. You can see those big beautiful hibiscus thoroughly enjoying their summer at camp. They just love sleeping under the stars.

Creole Lady says YEAH!!

An awful photo of that gorgeous little dwarf pomegranate bonsai which is exceeding all expectations for flowers and fruit!!

It's got at least four garnet-red pommies about the size of cherry tomatoes and a continuing cascade of neon-orange ballerina tutu flowers in leathery calyxes. What an awesome plant!!

Let's head out along the garage sidewalk toward the vegetable garden. Rudbeckia "Goldsturm" is battling with a hardy hibiscus  for supremacy. I've about had it with the hibiscus. So big and leggy and woody and thuggish, and it makes babies everywhere. But the thought of digging it out makes my back twinge. Maybe I can poison it. :D

I'd really rather grow roses, zinnias, cosmos and Rudbeckia. The foliage to flower ratio is much better on those.

Yes. Dig out those hibiscus. I will help you. Well, I will supervise.

Look how his little paw is just striking the sidewalk. 

Garden Makeover Part II

Here's the plan for my newly spacious front bed: I'm going to take a bunch of my planters and pots and sneak them into the bare spots I've made. Devious!

I plant three huge Rex begonias right into the bed, and move two large mixed planters of geraniums and Abutilon and fuchsia into the bare areas.  Instant color where there was only bare soil. They won't live through the winter, but that's OK. They'll color it up and act as placeholders until frost. It's cheating, sort of, but it's good cheating.

Hoo-wee does that ever look better.

It's OK with me if it looks kind of like a garden center tag sale. At least it's interesting and not full of deadheads and crap I don't want.

I put some tropicals I don't intend to bring into the greenhouse in the spaces where the lilies of the valley grew. It's kind of a crazy mix, but it sure beats a mess.

 With a bunch of the superfluous pots cleared away and planted out, the front entry looks neater and more inviting now.

Achimenes "Pink Nighty" is stealing the show, with shocking pink blossoms popping everywhere.

 

I've been propagating that plant like mad, so I can have some to give away this winter. 

Achimenes, which is a gesneriad (African violet/gloxinia/sinningia relative) has a charming habit of going dormant in fall, dying back, and leaving little green pinecone-like tubers in the soil. You keep those in a Ziploc bag at room temperature, and plant five of them to an 8" pot come spring.  

From practically nothing you get this amaaaazing compact but trailing, bushy plant that blooms and blooms and blooms.

And then when it dies back in fall, you store it over the winter in a Ziploc bag full of green pinecone thingies. Takes no space at all, but you have all the genetic material you need to start fresh in spring.

It's truly amazing. They let you know when they're ready to grow by putting out a little red shoot!

I'm kinda nuts about a new Rex begonia called Jurassic "Watermelon." I'd like to think T-rex had this color and pattern. 

Hibiscus "The Path" has just gone nuts this summer. She got a bigger pot and lots of plant food and manure. She liked that!

Heck, she's as tall as I am now. I'm already planning what not to bring into the greenhouse, on her behalf. Sorry, giant scraggly Rosemary. You've just been voted out of the Groanhouse.

You too, three oversized jasmines. Too much foliage and spread. We're cutting back to one jasmine.

In late summer, the sun's intensity has dropped enough that I can bring my bonsai Japanese maples out of the shade and display them on the front stoop. I love to watch them color up come fall.

When I was finally done with my garden/front porch makeover, I mowed the lawn. 

Right before I took this picture, Mr. Baker was lying, frogspraddled, right across the path of the mower. This is what he does when I mow. He glares balefully at me and moves at the very last second. Then lies down again where I will have to come through on the next pass. It's his way of bringing himself to my notice as I mow and sing and talk to myself.

So there you go.  A day well spent, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I like working hard, especially when the results are so easy to see. Maybe it's time for a late summer garden makeover at your house! 

Thanks to the tuberoses in the foreground, this view smells even better than it looks. I like to think of our meadow as the world's largest flowerbed.