Homemade sunflower seeds for free

Sunflowers are so wonderful to have in the garden. Its nice to look at, feeds the wild birds, can make a hedge when the summer is best and makes great food for poultry. A wonderful plant.

It's always nice to be self sufficient in food for livestock, but almost always impossible if you want to feed them thru winter without buying anything.

Also this almost always happens for one or more types of seeds... As soon as the summer is over, the rain and moist starts to make everything go bad.
Last year our corn seeds went "down with the rain", so we had to use store bought seeds for this year's harvest.

Otherwise sunflower seeds is easy food... You just dry them and give the hens a "head" a day, they enjoy picking the seeds free of the dry plant. But this year...

I have to do something, other wise we end up with nothing but rotten plants for compost.

So as an example, I have let this head of the flower dry on the plant table for a couple of nights. It's not dry yet at all, meanwhile the middle was bad and it's spreading, so I don't want to take any chances and wait any longer.

First I remove all the yellow leftovers from the flower, that's loosely held on to the seeds. I simply brush my hands over it firm, but not too hard.
 

Then I divide it into 2 pieces, just to make it more easy to handle.

Now I remove the seeds. If you have watched a hen or rooster doing it, you'll know what to do ;-)
Otherwise it's a bit like eating corn. You remove one to be able to remove the next.

I removed all the seeds, just not the bad ones in the middle, and put them on a tray in the same room as the fireplace. Not close to the heat, just to dry them, the humidity is always more low in the room with the fireplace. So at least we will have seeds for next year.

I'll see how much more I am able to harvest. Done like this though it takes a lot of time, and I need a lot of space to dry the seeds, so it has it's limits.

About feeding livestock with sunflowers (poultry):

During the summer, especially hens will find a lot of their own food, and regulate what they need at the huge food storage of mother nature.
During winter, when the ground is frozen and snow covering everything, they really need to be well fed to stay warm and healthy.

During winter we feed with:
A bowl of seeds (sunflower seeds among many other sorts)
A bowl of greens from the kitchen.
And to be sure they get all vitamins and minerals they need, they also get a bowl of store bought food at the side.