This year we planted sunflowers in with our corn — and when I say we, I mean, of course, my husband, who planted a couple of sunflower seeds in with every hill of corn.

He planted the corn the old-fashioned way, three or four seeds in hills spaced three feet apart, in rows three feet apart. And the sunflowers he added included giants, grey stripe, all the decorative sunflowers I had planned for the flower gardens, and handfuls taken from the can of black oil seed on the back porch that we use to fill the bird feeder.

Once I got over my disappointment over having lost a flower garden to the corn patch, I liked having sunflowers in the corn. The patch was roomy enough to walk through, even with a few volunteer pumpkin vines creeping along the ground, and by late summer it was my weekly delight to wander between the corn plants, stretching up to eight feet high, to find the brown and red and pink decorative sunflowers to cut for vases in the kitchen. The giants rose even higher than the corn, with foot-wide heads drooping lower as their seeds dried.

The corn’s all done now, but we’re still bringing in sunflowers, marveling at the engineering wonder that is a seed head, the intricate pattern and the perfect shape that keeps hundreds of seeds contained in a single parcel. Sometimes we’re too late and somebody — a raccoon or a family of blue jays — has beat us to the seeds.

But we’re happy to share. Even the seeds that make it into the house to be dried and sorted get shared — the kids love them but so do our pet bunnies, our chickens and that chipmunk who keeps getting into the house.

And when we filled the birdfeeder with our fresh-grown seeds, my husband swore the birds sang more beautifully than usual.

“They’re saying thank you,” he said.

It made me wonder where most bird food comes from, how old it is, and what’s really in it. Thistle seed (also called nyjer), safflower, sunflowers, but where do they come from? The biggest sunflower field I ever saw was in North Dakota, when I was taking a bus back east from Seattle. It seemed to me like that field was as big as North Dakota, but maybe that’s because I was involved in a long conversation with a nun from Bismark who was going to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minn. We weren’t talking about birds, and I think those sunflowers are grown for oil, anyway.

Five Rivers Environmental Center had a program last weekend on feeding the birds while reducing your cost and your carbon footprint. “With nyjer seed being imported from Myanmar, safflower from Utah, and white proso millet from Colorado, much of our bird seed travels farther than the birds do!” the center said in a press release.

Sheer laziness is one way to make your own yard more hospitable to birds. Letting some weeds grow, and letting some of your flowers and vegetable plants go to seed means more food for you winged friends. The arugula in our vegetable garden bolted in July, and the flowers were so pretty I just let it go. Then the seed pods were nice — long and thin — and we let that go too. When we harvested the plants for seed, we bound them together and hung them on a tall post in the garden, then watched as the sparrows and goldfinches came to feast.

The little birds also like the amaranth we let grow in the garden. It’s a weed to most people, but we like to harvest the early leaves as a spinach substitute, and the oxen like to eat the whole plant once it’s big and tough. And once it goes to seed, the birds are happy again, flitting through the garden, landing here and there and singing their thanks.

One easy way to feed the birds is to do nothing. Don’t deadhead all your flowers; let some go to seed. Don’t be too thorough in your fall garden cleanup; birds will perch on flower stalks and eat the seeds.

And if you do nothing but grow a few sunflowers, you’ll keep a lot of birds happy. Cardinals and jays go for the big seeds of the giants and grey stripes, and the little birds like the smaller seeds — especially those in the little decorative sunflowers. And if you manage to get those planted nearer to the house — say, in your flower garden instead of the corn patch — you’ll get to watch your happy visitors from the window.

Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and projects editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.