How to attract wild birds to your garden | TA Outdoors

Description

This short video shows how to use sunflower seeds to attract wild birds to your garden feeders. It is actually a very simple cost-effective method that will save you money! Graeme gives some short tips on how to collect sunflower seeds and use these seeds to attract some wild birds to your garden.

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Tags: Bird (Animal),Garden (Industry),Birds,Hunting,Wildlife,nature,wild,garden birds,wild birds,feed,feeder,bird feeder,how to,sunflower,seeds,sunflower seed,simple,cheap,easy,free,graeme pullen,graham pullen,ta outdoors,outdoors,wilderness.

Video Transcription

welcome to the totally awesome outdoor show now I do not like bird feed it's not enough that Birds we get in the garden a huge variety and of course we feed them of course we need to bring them into the garden to help them through the winter through those cold months all the different fat balls you can get the different types of seeds you can get and you know one of the seeds our family absolutely loved above all others it's a plain old sunflower seed now all bird lovers know when you put that out it generally gets eaten pretty quickly anyway but I was thinking about it how can I get the best benefit out of those sunflower seeds not just to feed the bird but for my own enjoyment as well now all you got to do is get yourself a small handful of the bird seeds you bought I haven't been to a garden center I haven't bought special packets of sunflower seeds in fact I have no idea what the Latin name of these sunflower seeds are I just thought I'm going to plant them they germinate I'll get the seedlings I'll plant the seedlings out just in our regular clay soil and they're going to take potluck lucky for me they came out they've grown to somewhere around 6 foot it's now in the autumn so they're starting to tone down they're going to seeds and of course I've had the enjoyment of those flowers all summer and now I can harness those seeds as well and do you know what the birds get cooked wait get everything coming on they call their Christmases and their birthdays have come at once but I will have hopefully another supply of sunflowers through the winter this is how I do it once the flower has had each moment of glory come the autumn it's going to start decay it's going to start dying back and then as you can see here the pedals are off it and basically you can crumble off the front of it and as it crumbles away it reveals beneath the black seeds so that bright yellow centers gone that was so vivid during the summer it falls off easily it doesn't fall of easily then it's you know not ready to take to seed and if you've got to pull the petals off it's still not ready they're still although there's no life left in this particular one it's fading back it's not really ready for harvesting should we say and this one as you can see is and then I go around harvesting all the heads just slipping them back with a pair of secateurs if you use scissors if you want to and bear in mind this was just all giving me some color a little bit of vibrant color through the summer a bit of fun and it cost me nothing because all these seeds just came out of a packet of birdseed can you believe so slip them all off but leave the one for the pedals don't cut those off as you can see they don't rub off the front is still stuck to the seeds at the back so that one is not ready for harvest II get a bit more fun out of the color and only take off the dip ones once you've collected a good number of these in fact really basically I try and do them all at once or trying it all of those heads run to see if I can there always be a few hangers on with give you a bit of color there but I want to get the bulk of them done into the box there so I can start to dry them out and work on now you can see here some of these are already falling down because we get a lot of wind up here and it's very dry soil and it's self facing so they tend to of what we call burnt out a little bit and when they fall down like this especially in the autumn just be aware that when they touch the grass it's going to be a lot of jus at that time of year and they could rock the heads out I'm still going to cut them we're going to have to dry them out properly and the benefit of course the rest of the stem when it's pulled out like this I let it die off bend them up they make great compost as well nothing wasted so there you can see for about what fifty sixty seeds from that packet of birdseed of all look garden see just regular birdseed same thing Eagles I've got a huge number of heads here a huge number from which to collect dry and keep my sunflower seeds so what I'm going to do with these as I lay them out in the potting shed you would think we dry them out somewhere like the greenhouse no that's too harsh that's too even in the late autumn that still too harsh environment I feel I think they fed her off gets in a cool dark place that is dry could be a garage it could be a greenhouse and I'll try to separate them because you don't want them getting damp you want to keep them dry you want me to dry out but I'm just going to show you this one because this has been dried in the Sun it is a giant sunflower head I'm going to basically knock all this off just to show you how many seeds there are in this one head and I've only done this as a sort of pastime if you like you think again where the birds have already started on this and I'm going to be using a white tray just here like this generally I would just drive the hitch first and then when it's dry I rubbed them and they come out but just going to do this to show you just for now take it put it over the top of the white tray and just gently break it apart look at this lot coming out unbelievable just rolled and jetting out this was not totally drawing because it was damp overnight last night but I'm doing it just to show you what it looks like and the white tray you'll be able to see all these seeds coming out the heads again compost them good for the garden so you're wasting absolutely nothing so I'm going to throw these heads I'm going to lay them out individually on my potting shed table in there give them about three weeks or a month and then I'll take them out put them in the kitchen and I can sit at my leisure and strip all those seeds out as I show you just now

but I'll be back someday to keep certain you can either put these sunflower heads out when they are dry on their own as you can see here I've laid this down last night and already this morning all the birds have been round there especially the blue tits and I believe then that hatch has been there as well pecking away and has actually started stripping them out or you can put the seeds loose I don't put too many loose seeds in the actual open tray because you get pigeons and they're just scuffle up but the new seeds I've taken off can go into the bird feeder and obviously that's only the small birds that can get it and that's what you want so there you can see you can have some great enjoyment and fun growing these giant sunflower heads I don't forget one so you can provide several huge heads like this so I enjoy watching the flowers through the summer that birds were there almost up there ready to come down now I'm going to watch those all through the winter and all through planting one tiny little seed thanks for watching the totally awesome outdoor show hopefully you got some tips there hopefully you'll have some fun with both the flowers and the birds we'll see you again next time in Spain still living everyday here in the party way

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