“Hm, I’ve already established that this nation in my story has a lot of sunflowers as a background detail, I should take five minutes real quick to see what those can be used for.”
🎶You can eat the stalks! You can eat the leaves! You can eat the petals! You can eat the seeds! You can eat the tubers! Turn ‘em into booze! Go and plant some sunflowers! If you don’t you lose! 🎶
They’re also one of the few plants which can reclaim fallout.
They also scrub radiation and heavy metals from their environment, yeah.
Target audience reached.
The highest calorie plant crop you can grow per soil unit is sunflowers iirc - from the oil
Since food from plants is an unending battle of trying to get calories out of dirt, this is a fascinating fact!
(Edit: I don’t think I’m recalling this in a useful way so let me go dig up the source (ha) before counting on this fact)
I don’t know about the radiation but I have a slight clarification on the heavy metals thing - sunflowers concentrate heavy metals in their tissues. So to use them for clean up, you have to harvest them (including roots, where a lot of the metals are most concentrated) and then dispose of the sunflowers in a safe location away from the contaminated area. Sunflowers don’t just get rid of heavy metals on their own
This is in contrast to things like using mushrooms to clean up soil that is contaminated with oil - oil is made up of carbon so it can actually be broken down and changed into molecules that are less harmful. No mushroom removal needed. But metals are metals, there’s nothing about them that can be broken down into something else
That’s a really good point and I don’t want it to distract me from fact-checking my fact (I’m pretty sure I’m wrong and it’s something like “sunflower is the most fat you can get from plant crops in a permaculture setup (as opposed to controlling industrial levels of farmland)” but I’m super distracted right now) but it bothers me so much when the assumption of remediation is that the plants just delete stuff from existence. They don’t!
