Black Oil Sunflower Seeds: Grow Bouquets or Birdseed
A timeless symbol of summer, sunflowers lend vibrant energy to any garden. Black oil sunflower seeds may be sold readily as birdseed, but did you know you can also grow them for a flush of cheerful color in your garden beds?
At the end of the season, I bought a huge bag of black oil sunflower seeds to grow sunflowers in the garden for my girls to cut all season long. I can’t wait to grow these sunflowers with my daughters in our garden!
What do black oil sunflower seeds look like?
A black oil sunflower seed can be rather skinny or a little plump. These oily seeds are pure, dark black and have a shell that may chip or crack during storage in the large bulk bag. The internal nut of the seed is tan or light brown and looks much like a sunflower kernel you might see in your favorite trail mix, although these are more preferred for feeding wildlife.
It’s relatively easy for birds of all sizes to break the shell to access the seed.
Do sunflowers grow back if tops get cut off? (or eaten)
The one thing we noticed when growing black oil sunflowers from seed, is that our resident groundhog or some other critter took a liking to them. In fact, this garden pest bit the tops off several sunflowers before bloom.
Fortunately, we discovered that new growth comes back through the leaf nodes as long as those are still intact!
We took this as a fun experiment and enjoyed discovering that sunflowers work much like many other flowers. You can in fact “pinch” them (or in this case, an animal can eat the tops off) to encourage a bushier plant with more blooms!
Although something chomped our sunflowers, we ended up with TWO flowers from those plants! They weren’t as big as the single blooms on other plants, but we loved seeing Mother Nature’s wonderful persistence.
For more tips on reading clues on what’s wrong with sunflowers, check out my post about Sunflower Leaves!
How to Grow Black Oil Sunflowers for Bouquets
We found that growing black oil sunflowers is no different than growing traditional sunflowers. We planted the seeds and they grew beautifully!
Growing black oil sunflowers for bouquets is arguably just as fun if not more so – than simply growing sunflowers for more seeds. You can create your own cutting garden of sunflowers with tons of blooms, depending on your space.
Once you snip a few sunflower stems, expect to see new growth coming from the leaf nodes! If you harvest flowers or deadhead black oil sunflowers soon enough in the season, you may enjoy a cut-and-come-again flower harvest.
What Flowers Go Well with Black Oil Sunflowers?
When making our own bouquets last year, our daughters cut black oil sunflowers, marigolds, and zinnias and they looked incredible in the vases and bouquets together. We bought little flower water tubes and vials for bouquets so they could give flowers to their teachers and coaches, and it worked out great!
Our favorite combinations with black oil sunflower blossoms:
- Pink Zinnias
- Crackerjack Marigolds (orange)
- All Sunflowers
This year we look forward to putting together many different bouquets!
Black Oil Sunflower Seeds for Birds (and Squirrels)
High protein and high oil content make these seeds a healthy choice for wild birds. So many different backyard birds will enjoy the seeds, not to mention squirrels and rodents, if they can get to them.
Black oil sunflower birdseed offers an economical choice in feeding your favorite feathered friends. I bought a huge bulk bag for $10 at Agway.
As a bonus, you can plant black oil sunflower seeds to grow your own birdseed or simply fill your garden with pretty sunflowers for cutting bouquets.
If you serve up birdseed with black oil sunflower seeds, expect to see some squirrels going after it, too.
It shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve got enough to go around, but squirrels love this stuff! Hopefully they leave enough for the birds!
Speaking of birdseed, if you feed the birds, you may be interested in my post on the best birdseed storage containers.
FAQ
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Have you ever grown black oil sunflowers? Planning on it? Let’s chat in the comments – I’d love to hear from you!
03.19.23 – Updated to make it more current. Bolded subheadings and added disclaimer and FAQ.
I’ve always bought sunflower seeds specifically to plant. But this year I all of a sudden had a bunch of plants popping up in a bed in my backyard at my new place. Used an app to identify them and it said they were sunflowers. Realize they had spilled out of a feeder in the wind that I had in that bed earlier.
Well now I have this amazing amount of gorgeous tall healthy beautiful sunflowers growing out back. I had no idea that bird seed ones would grow so perfectly. They are nicer than any I’ve ever purchased!
I had about an acre of ground disced up for some extra garden space, but wasn’t going to use it all for garden. I wanted to put something in there for a ground cover. Since I have Black oil sunflowers pop up everywhere from bird or chipmunks self seeding them I thought maybe that would work. So using a regular lawn broadcast spreader I covered the area, then just ran over it with a section of chainlink fence behind my tractor to mix the seeds with the soil. Soon enough I had pretty large stand of sunflowers next to the road. We even had a couple neighbors comment how much the enjoyed them! Just wish there was an easy way to harvest the seeds to keep for our freeloader birds this winter.
Wow, Rod, that sounds amazing! Loved hearing how you did this. It sounds gorgeous and I am sure the animals and neighbors love it plus all those who drive by! Thanks for sharing your story and process to create a black oil sunflower field. I wouldn’t have thought of the chain link fence behind the tractor – really clever to till them in! I would love to see your sunflower field if you feel like sharing a photo.
Just a quick idea for your freeloader birds and other winter visitors – Can you get a platform feeder and just stick a dried sunflower head out there a couple times a week? Let the animals do the work! This summer we had a beautiful red branching sunflower and got to see birds flying up and eating seeds right off the sunflower heads before I’d gotten a chance to cut the spent ones down. We even had gold finches – it was awesome! If you have a place to store the dried sunflower heads that would be safe and secure, that would be my best suggestion! (saves you the hours of removing seeds! Downside – might attract pests in a garage or etc.)
Let us know how it goes!
A couple years ago I had 14 acres in North Texas pretty barren in coastal hay. I bought 4 pounds of black oil birdseed, drove around in my pickup and flung handfuls out the window right before a rain. Looked like they all came up! Every morning they all faced east and dazzled everyone driving by. I left them standing and the birds dropped over 100 varieties of seed. So easy to seed wildflowers.
I seeded a raised bed here in the NM mountains if Santa Fe. I do love the wild sunflowers, though, perfect summer salad greens. If I get black oil sfs, I will be thrilled.
Hi Rebecca, what an amazing story – thank you so much for taking the time to share it with us. I have such a lovely vision of your sunflower field and your wildflower field. If you have a photo and would like to share, please feel free to email! I hope your raised bed of black oil sunflowers does well for you as well! Happy Gardening. 🙂