Oh, Just Count Out About 200 . . .

"Oh, just count out about 200," suggests my husband as I stare at this pile on the kitchen table, on the very snowy, stay home day that was last Saturday morning:

We have entered a new phase of gardening. With this pile of sunflower seeds, I think we've officially become seed savers. Which means that instead of buying seed from the store, catalog, whatever . . . we just save some of the seed from last year's crops to plant the coming year. I know this is not a new idea at all; in fact I think that people a hundred years ago would find it odd that you wouldn't do this. But for us crazy people, its a new adventure.

It all started last summer when one of the mammoth sunflowers we grew from seed turned out to be truly mammoth. I'm talking a seed head that was 18 to 24 inches across. I looked at that flower, and then looked at my husband and said that "that one is not going for turkey food. With those kind of genetics, we ought to try some of those seeds out." So when it dried out, we raked all the seeds out it and a couple of other nice looking sunflower seed heads, and put them in vented ziplocs, in our chilly upstairs bedroom.

With all the snow that has showed up over the past couple of days, we were feeling kinda bad that we didn't have any seed to put out in the bird feeders. Oh wait, we have bags of sunflower seeds upstairs, and we surely are not going to need 1000's of seeds for planting; let's just count out a couple of hundred of the best looking ones and feed the rest to the birds. This is how I ended up with the pile of sunflower seeds on my kitchen table.


I was literally counting them out ten at a time into a container to get 200. Up close they look like this:

Going for solid seeds, no borer holes, and little to no mildew on the outside. The bigger the better, as long as they are solid and not hollow feeling or cracked.

Turns out 200 in the container looks like this:

Which according to Ryan didn't seem like enough, so then he joined in the sorting, and we just sorted until we filled up the container. Not that we will plant even half of those, but you know, we'd rather have too many than not enough.

The rest went into the bird feeder, which our neighborhood cardinals and juncos seemed to enjoy; judging by the amount of sunflower seed hulls on the snow.