eggs & tea blog

One of the ideas i wanted to try out for feeding our chickens was sunflower seeds. People told me they are very easy to grow. So, back on June 16, i planted 15m of sunflowers (3 rows of 5m each). I dug troughs in the ground, filled them with compost, put plenty of soaked sunflower seeds in the ground, then thinned them as they grew. They grew up quickly, made beautiful flowers, then at 3 months of age, they drooped and turned dark. Finally yesterday i gathered the heads. The biggest one (below) wasn’t too big.

Most of the heads are small and immature. Trying to get seeds out of them, there are only a few usable seeds at the outer edge:

I suspect that my batch of sunflowers will barely produce enough seeds to replant the same rows. (Online resources say that i must wait until the heads are completely dried out before collecting the seeds. Otherwise, they are hard to remove. So, i won’t know how many seeds i got until later.)

This was not too successful as a way to grow chicken feed. If i tried it again, perhaps i could:

• Use different seeds? These were just random seeds bought as food.
• Plant earlier? Perhaps they will like April and May better.
• More fertilizer? The roots seem shallow and i did give them some rich compost, but i could try more.

Related posts:

1. Sunflowers Most of what i’ve been up to on the farm...
2. Fava Beans – no luck We’re trying to find any alternative to importing chicken feed...
3. Azolla update As my Azolla grew, i found a place to put...
4. First successful cuttings! Here they are. I know it may not look like...
5. Nancy Redfeather’s Kawanui Farm On Saturday, Deb and i made the long trip to...

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Saturday, October 7th, 2006 at 10:40 pm and is filed under chickens, crops, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.