Grow Your Own Safflower Seed
Looking to keep the squirrels off your feeders? Try changing your birdseed. Birds like safflower seed squirrels dislike it. So, if you are looking for a great way to feed the birds and keep the squirrels at bay, look toward the seed.
What is Safflower?
Safflowers are thistle-like annual with globe flowers in yellow, orange, or red flowers.
The flower is commercially cultivated for vegetable oil that is extracted from the seeds. Each branch will have from one to five flower heads containing 15 to 20 white seeds per head.
Traditionally, the safflower was grown for its seeds, and used for coloring and flavoring foods, in medicines, and making red and yellow dyes. The plants have been cultivated mainly for the vegetable oil extracted from the seeds and the petals are harvest and dried to create safflower tea.
What Does Safflower Seed Look Like?
A medium-size, pale yellow colored hard shell seed. Birds ‘shell’ them to eat the ‘meat’ inside.
The seeds are high in fat, fiber and protein, making them ideal for feeding the birds.
- Attract cardinals, nuthatches, titmice and chickadees
- Most squirrels, blackbirds common grackle and crows will not eat
- Store seed in a metal trash can with tight lid
Birds That Enjoy Safflower Seeds
- Black-capped chickadees
- Black-headed grosbeaks
- Blue jays
- Carolina chickadees
- Downy woodpeckers
- Evening grosbeaks
- House finches
- Mourning doves
- Northern cardinals
- Purple finches
- Red-bellied woodpeckers
- Rose-breasted grosbeaks
- Tufted titmice
- White-breasted nuthatches
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Feeders To Use Seed In
Grow Your Own Safflowers
Safflower Is Easy To Grow
You can just plant safflower seeds about an inch deep in the soil and walk away. The rest is up to Mother Nature. The flowers grow, blossom, and go to seed. If you’d like to collect the seed or the birds will do it naturally for you.
Growing Conditions
1.) Plant in full sun.
2.) The plant grows in a variety of soil conditions but loves high nitrogen and phosphorus content.
3.) It takes approximately 100 days to seed.
Safflowers love hot, dry conditions.
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Safflower Tea – has some medical claims to helping prevent “hardening of the arteries,” lower cholesterol, and reducing the risk of heart disease
Plant Characteristics
- Annual with a really long taproot
- Flowers range from yellow, oranges, and reds
- Each seed produces a stem is 2.5 – 3 feet high
- Each stem produces branches with loads of flowers that bloom in mid & late summer
- Each flower produces 10-20 seeds in the late fall
- Butterflies enjoy the nectar of the flowers when migrating
Harvesting Seeds
- Leave the flowers dry on the plants. The seed mature for 4-5 weeks after flowering ends.
- You don’t have to harvest the seeds if you don’t wish. The birds will do it for you.
- If you want to save some seeds, then wear protective gloves and harvest the flower buds in a paper bag.
- Safflower leaves are a little picky (that is why I use gloves to harvest), so I tend to leave them to stay where they grow until I am ready to harvest.
- Frost kills the taproot and the annual plant, so next year you can start all over again next year if you wish.
Closing
If you are looking to limit squirrels, blackbirds, grackles and other not so welcomed critters at your feeders, buy safflower seed to use in feeders or try your hand at growing your own.
Besides deterring the unwanted critters, the seed will attract plenty of welcomed backyard birds.
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