Each fall I delay pulling my summer vegetables and annual flowers, reluctant to acknowledge the ever-shortening days while we are still enjoying our warm summer-like weather.  I am usually optimistic that just a few more days in late September will yield the most perfectly ripe tomato or tender summer squash of the season.  But those extra days never do, and especially not this year.  My tomatoes were a flop and my squash was nonexistent.  Even my usually reliable basil failed to flourish like usual.  What a disastrous summer for my vegetable garden! 

I happily pulled these remnants of my summer failure, optimistically looking forward to better success with my winter vegetable garden.  But I stopped at pulling out my sunflowers and zinnias.  As terrible as the faded sunflowers look, with their petals dropped and green stalks turned to yellow and brown, I knew that the birds would appreciate their ripened seeds.  And the zinnias?  Well, they still bloomed and, for some reason, the birds seem to like them.  (It turns out that they eat zinnia seeds too.) 

I cut the sunflower stalks to about 3-4 feet long and wound them through the wire fencing that once supported my attempt at growing miniature pumpkins.  It wasn’t the prettiest sight, but the wildlife more than made up for it—for the next 8 weeks or so, finches, sparrows, little brown jobbers, and scrub jays flocked to the spent flowers, enthusiastically picking at the seeds.  It was great fun to watch!

Since then I did a little research and learned that birds especially like a few types of sunflowers that can be planted in one’s yard, including large sunflowers like ‘Mammoth’ and ‘Kong’ to smaller sunflowers like ‘Black Peredovik.’  I haven’t planted anything fancy, however, just whatever pretty multi-branched cutting mix catches my eye each summer, and the birds have liked them just fine.