How to Harvest Sunflowers With a Corn Picker

Gardeners, birdwatchers, cooks and homemakers value sunflowers for their nutritious seeds and large, cheerful blossoms. The flowers grow easily in sunny locations with well-drained soil, and are ready for harvest when their heads dry out, turn brown and lose all their flowers. You can facilitate sunflower harvesting with a corn-head tool modified with a special sunflower-cutting attachment.

Shim tool
Wrench

Instructions

- 1
  Loosen any hardware holding the corn picker’s snouts in place. Remove the snouts, using a shim tool if necessary. This will expose the deck plates used to cut corn.
- 2
  Loosen the bolts used to secure the deck plates. Remove the deck plates and replace them with sunflower harvesting plates. Attach the sunflower plates using the same bolts used to secure the deck plates.
- 3
  Set the switch in the corn header cab to the “Corn” setting. Sunflower-cutting attachments are designed to cut rows of sunflowers planted the same width apart as corn.
- 4
  Replace the corn picker’s snouts. Line up the corn picker so that the harvesting plates line up with the rows of sunflower stems. Drive the picker toward the sunflowers at a speed of 1/10th of a mile per hour to harvest sunflowers.

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