Li Jianguo was screening flower sunflower seeds in the yard. He had planted these sunflowers at the northern end of his watermelon field, hauled them home, and knocked the seeds out of the heads one by one in his yard. Then he winnowed away the dried flowers and shook out the empty seeds, bagging what remained so he could roast a plateful for everyone to snack on when they had time in winter.
What Li Long had said earlier made him feel that growing flower sunflowers was actually a pretty good idea.
It was the third year since the Household Responsibility System had allotted fields to individual families, and now people occasionally came by bicycle or horse-drawn cart to buy up their small lots of farm produce.
Half a month earlier, someone had come to buy flower sunflower seeds, offering ninety cents, more than twice the price of oil sunflower seeds.
Li Jianguo had not sold any. His family did not need that little bit of money, so he had kept them. After all, roasted flower sunflower seeds did not dirty your mouth. Roasted oil sunflower seeds tasted good, but cracking them left your mouth black, which did not look nice.
Thinking it over now, growing flower sunflowers on a large scale still looked promising.
The roasted flower sunflower seeds in the general store were not sold by the kilogram, but by the small paper cup or enamel mug.
A small paper cup-actually a triangle folded from newspaper, opened up to hold seeds-probably held less than fifty grams. They had sold for five cents at first, but now the price had risen to ten.
An enamel mug held more and cost more, twenty or thirty cents.
That meant roasted flower sunflower seeds actually sold for two or three yuan a