Sunflower

a tall herb of the composite family. Wild sunflowers are coarse, rough plants with no beauty of foliage, but when they are in the full bloom of autumn they form a feature of our landscape worth going a day's journey to see. Altogether there are about eighty species, nearly all native to North America. Cultivated sunflowers are a field crop of importance in Europe, especially in Russia, where the seeds are eaten raw on the street as peanuts are in this country. A table oil is pressed from the seeds. A second pressing yields an oil for candle and soap making. The seeds from which oil has been pressed are sold to Denmark as oil-cake for chicken feed. The stems are used for fuel. The cultivation of sunflowers is much the same as that of corn. Heads cured indoors on racks yield the finest oil. Ordinarily the stalks are cut and stood together in ricks heads upward until thoroughly dry. The heads are then cut off and threshed with flails. A bushel of kernels yields three gallons of oil.