Hello all!

I found this local seed dealer who also offers to mix your own recipe!

So I was thinking of making my own budgie seed mix. (I hope I translated all the various seeds correctly... )
This is the mix I would order, but since I just bought a bag of 20 kg I thought of asking you guys for input first. Is there something you would drop, add, increase or decrease in values?

Also note I would still provide this mix with a 50% mix of nutri bird B14

kind vs % in the mix
white millet - 15
yellow millet - 15
Japanese millet - 15
flat seed - 10 (canary seed?)
hulled oats - 6
Negro seed - 4
white dari - 4
red dari - 4
sesame - 3
rice / paddy - 3
clipped oats - 3
linseed - 3
barley - 3
rapeseed / rape - 1 + 1 (Brassica rapa subsp. oleifera / Brassica napus) (posted latin names for these, but if one is not available I would substitute with the other going for 2% total)
poppy seed - 1
safflower seeds - 1
sunflower seeds - 1
spelt - 1
hemp seed - 1
buckwheat - 1
Kardi seed - 1
sorhum - 1
wheat - 1
corn - 1 (preferably the broken maize kind - not sure about this though)

I was enthousiastic about making my own mix, but ended up with all kinds of seeds and couldn't decide what to drop entirely.

What do you guys think?
(Also I'm not sure all the seeds will be available, so I've put them in order of (imo) importance. Meaning if you would drop one kind I personally would add the amount to one of the seeds noted higher up.

EDIT: I just wanted to add that the dealer is an elderly man who doesn't have a website available at all... If I ever was to change jobs I'd ask him if he needed any help and push towards an online shop to up the sales and look for a business partner for shipments. But that's just me :-)

The big question is whether your budgies will actually eat all of these seeds. If your budgies will enjoy having such a big variety then go for it, but if they're more conservative and wary of unfamiliar things it will be fine to get something simpler. Many of these seeds are fairly similar in their nutritional content so it won't make a big difference in the diet if you leave some of them out. The basic seeds in a plain budgie mix are millet, canary seed and oat groats. Flax (linseed) is good to have in the diet because it's a rich source of Omega 3 essential fatty acids which are difficult to get in the diet.

Some of these seeds might be too big or too hard for budgies to eat. My cockatiels can't crack dry wheat and rice or dried corn so I doubt that budgies can do it. Sunflower and safflower aren't usually in budgie mixes so it's likely that budgies can't handle them either. But if you feed these seeds to your cockatiels you could give some to the budgies before your order anything to see if they can handle it.

A lot of birdseed is actually a grain not a "true" seed. The difference between grain and seeds is that seeds are a lot higher in fat. Most pet birds aren't very active so we need to keep the fat in their diet fairly low. But your birds are outdoors, and it's beneficial to have more fat in the diet during the winter because they need more calories to help maintain their body heat. Sunflower, safflower and hemp are oil seeds so the fat content is pretty high. Hemp has more Omega 3 fat than most seeds (but not as much as flax) so it's a good seed to offer in the winter or during breeding season. I've seen a parrotlet eating hemp seed and cracking the shells off easily, so your budgies can probably handle it.

Thanks for your reply! I still have to visit the guy and ask what he has available.
I'll do that somewhere in the future (next month maybe - since I have my supply ready now) and adjust my plans accordingly.

about the rice/paddy. That's not actually rice grains like we know them ... They look like this:

The wheat is used mostly to germinate overhere in Belgium. But I don't give germinated food since it spoils to fast. This is what it looks like :
I do think the broken corn seeds are hard, and I was probably going to cut them anyway. But if they don't get eaten if I try them... the chickens I have will be very happy

sunflower is commonly used in budgie mixes overhere but in very small dosages. And it's the first thing they go after (likewise for the cockatiels)

The rice grains are still inside, they just haven't had the hull removed yet.