If you're a bird owner, you've probably heard about the wonders of sprouting your own seeds. Sprouts are touted as one of the best things you can feed your bird.

In general, this is true. However, it might surprise you to learn that sprouts also can introduce health problems - and that there's an even better way to feed seeds.

The trouble with sprouts
A few years ago, when they had just started to advertise in the bird magazines, I bought my very first sprout kit with all the bells and whistles from a popular bird-food company. With my background in nutrition, I knew that sprouts would be a wonderful addition to our birds' diet, and I started my first batches with zeal.

The kit included three mason jars with screened lids, and a tower in which to place each jar at a tilt - this was to make sure the moisture ran off and there was good air circulation. The kit also came with a couple of different packages of seeds, one for general feeding and a second "micrograin" formula for smaller parrots.

So that you always had sprouts ready for feeding, the kit suggested starting a new batch every day or so. By the time I had started the last of my three batches on the fourth day, the first one was to be ready to be harvested.

I had rinsed the growing sprouts religiously and rotated the jars' contents to encourage air to circulate, as directed. But something wasn't right. My first batch of sprouts smelled musty and sour. I figured I had done something wrong, re-read the instructions, and plowed ahead. But the next batch, and the batch after that, turned out the same.

The kit warned that if the sprouts smelled bad, you shouldn't feed them because of the danger of bacteria. So one by one, I threw out all my batches. I wasn’t a happy camper and I called the company.

ANY OF THE FOLLOWING pulses - seeds, grains, legumes, nuts, nut seeds and vegetable seeds - are great choices for germinating your own bird food. Steer clear of large raw beans such as anasazi, black, kidney, lima, navy, pinto, and soy because they can cause digestive problems. Nuts: almonds, Brazil, filberts, pecans, pine or pignoli nuts, pistachios, walnuts Nut seeds: pumpkin (quality fats), unhulled sesame (quality fats, vitamins and minerals), sunflower. Grains: amaranth (cornsilk scent, tiny and requires lid with small grid), barley (nice and chewy), unhulled millet (complete protein), oats, hulled quinoa (high in protein), rye, raw and unhulled wheat/buckwheat, whole-grain brown rice (fiber and B vitamins) Legumes: chick, lentils, mung (minerals and vitamins A, B, C). Vegetable seeds: alfalfa (protein, vitamins and minerals), anise (strong flavor, use sparingly), broccoli, cabbage (vitamins A and C, minerals), corn, green peas, kale, radish (high in vitamin C and potassium), turnip Gelatinous: Chia, flax (fiber, protein, essential oils), watercress, teff. Add a pinch of these for texture and variety. -- MK

The customer service was great. After going over a short checklist of things that could be causing the problem, we eliminated everything but our damp basement, which they thought was causing the mold to grow. I had 10 pounds of raw sprouting mix in my refrigerator, I didn't have another location to sprout it in, and I was devastated at the thought that this wasn't going to work out.

Customer service came to the rescue again. They told me about germination, the process of simply soaking the seeds to the point where the root tip shows. You feed the germinated seeds to your birds, without sprouting them "to green". All I had to do was leave the seeds out on the counter in pure water overnight - approximately eight hours - and in the morning they were ready to go.

Germinate, don't sprout
Feeding seeds, nuts, grains and legumes that have been allowed to germinate - but not sprout into young plants - is an easy, clean and safe way to get super nutrition into your birds.

Germination is safer because the process is shorter. The seeds don’t have time to deteriorate, as they will when in water for too long. Just-germinated seeds have fresh, intact hulls and coverings that haven't had time to grow bacteria. In contrast, sprouts' hulls and coverings often aren't washed away during rinses and tend to deteriorate and spoil.

Germinated seeds also have a nutritional advantage over sprouts. Why? It's because of how enzymes work.

Not sure what an enzyme is? Here’s a Biology 101 refresher: Enzymes are complex proteins that serve as catalysts for various body processes. There are three types: Metabolic, digestive and food. Metabolic enzymes give our bodies energy - to exercise, heal, think, talk and breathe, among other activities. Digestive enzymes, manufactured primarily by the pancreas, help break down food in the stomach.

Food enzymes occur naturally in uncooked, non-irradiated vegetables, fruits and seeds and grains. These enzymes start the process of digestion in the mouth and upper stomach, significantly reducing the amount of digestive enzymes our bodies need to produce to break down the food.

You can purchase a variety of human-grade seeds, nuts and grains for germinating from health-food and mail-order stores.

One school of thought says our bodies are endowed at birth with the ability to produce a certain quantity of enzymes. Once that quantity is depleted, we begin to age. So it may be very important indeed to get as many of our enzymes as possible from food. The trick is keeping food at its enzyme peak.

Food enzymes are delicate substances. They begin to work at room temperature and increase in activity once in our mouths. However, cooking temperatures over 118 degrees destroys them. When we eat this cooked food, we have to provide all the required enzymes for digestion, a job that requires more energy than any other bodily process. Ever notice how tired and listless you feel after a large cooked meal? The extra digestion required to process the enzymeless food is sapping your energy. Living foods - fresh fruits and vegetables, that big salad you made for dinner - have active enzymes that supplement, instead of use up, the body's supply.

At the other end of the food-preparation spectrum, raw seeds require even more energy to digest than overcooked foods. How can this be? Raw seeds contain enzyme inhibitors. The inhibitors help ensure the seeds' survival by keeping them in a dormant state until good growing conditions are present. However, when we or our birds eat these raw seeds, not only do we have to supply all the enzymes necessary to digest them, we have to manufacture yet more enzymes to neutralize the inhibitors - a double-whammy drain on energy.

To germinate seeds above ground, we use hydroponics - soaking directly in water, preferably pure (more on that later). When the water turns cloudy, we know the seed has shed its enzyme inhibitors and has awakened, ready to burst with pent-up energy for growing into a plant. From now until a ¼-inch root tip is the best time to feed the soaked seeds to your bird. They are richer in active enzymes and vitamins than they'll ever be.

The human race has a long tradition of dining on just-germinated seeds. The word "pulse" - meaning germinated plant from any sown grain, legume, nut, nut seed or vegetable seed - has been around since biblical times. The Bible's Daniel thrived on pulses and water while others did not do as well eating King Nebuchadnezzar's cooked food - even back then there was evidence that germinated seeds were more nutritious.

George Bernard Shaw could have been talking about the wisdom of eating pulses when he said, "Think of the fierce energy concentration in an acorn. You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a great oak. Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay."

A word about water
Pure water produces the healthiest pulses. Many respected aviculturists promote the use of distilled and purified water, which is great advice. Tap and even bottled waters have big problems, as we will see.

Our tap water has become an alarming soup of contaminants. While a few come from nature, such as wildlife pathogens (giardia and cryptosporidium) or toxic minerals leached from the ground (mercury, arsenic, or radon), the bulk is manmade or results from human activity. For example, an estimated 70,000 synthetic chemicals are registered for commercial use in the world today, with 1,000 new ones being concocted each year, according to About.com. Many of these chemicals are toxic and even carcinogenic; what's more, little is known of their chronic or synergistic effects. Contamination from sewage, pesticide runoff, industrial waste, defective water treatment and improper dumping has also found its way into our water tables.

The most popular alternative to tap water is spring or distilled water in plastic jugs. However, this may not be the best source of water either, because of the chemicals that clear plastic bottles can shed when scratched or heated. Have you ever noticed the plastic taste that you get when drinking warm bottled water?

For instance, a few years ago the Food and Drug Administration reported that most baby bottles are capable of leaching the synthetic estrogen bisphenol-A, thought to cause cell injury, errors in DNA, tumors and endocrine disruption.

Personally, I think the best way to avoid the problems of chemicals in municipal water supplies and the possible dangers of plastic bottles is to invest in a good water filter and a water distiller. A ten-stage water filter on our kitchen tap eliminates some of the chemicals. We use a tabletop distiller to get rid of the rest, such as fluoride, which our birds don't need. (Go here for a useful distiller FAQ.)

Once you've been drinking pure, clean water for a while, you'll be able to smell the chemicals in unprocessed tap water. We also use hot water filters on each of our showerheads. As a result, all the birds and the humans in our home are bathing without chemicals and have cleaner and healthier skin and feathers or hair.

Should you worry about losing important minerals if you distill your water? It seems to me if you eat a good enzyme-active, fresh-food diet, you will only gain a healthier source of vitamins and minerals. However, we can add back minerals we humans need with products such as Celtic Sea Salt.

Roll up your sleeves
Where do you get seeds for germinating? First, a "don’t": Never use garden seed because it may contain chemicals to retard bacterial growth in the ground. Purchase only pulses meant for sprouting, including unstabilized grains.

Pre-mixed pulses are great if you don't have a health food store like our Sonnewalds Natural Foods here in Pennsylvania, or a farmers' market nearby that sells pulses in bulk. I've bought from Sun Organic and The Grain & Salt Society. The drawback of ordering seeds for germination is the shipping time and storage, especially during the summer when temperatures in a nonrefrigerated truck can soar to over 100 degrees. Buying fresh is best. It also gives you more control over how many seeds of various types you buy, in case your bird likes one item more than another. In any case, if you wind up with leftover pulses from these seeds, you can always plant them and start your own outdoor or indoor garden, a great project for kids.

Grouping seeds by size can make germinating them easier because they will sprout at the same time.

As you try your own hand at soaking and feeding seeds, you'll no doubt develop strategies for how to do some things. One area open to creativity is the types of seeds you use and how you combine them for soaking and storage. As the seeds soak they’ll double in size, so you need only a little bit of each item for great variety. At any rate, it's a good idea not to prepare more than three days’ worth to ensure freshness.

The first thing I do is separate my pulses into Mason jars. When I first started, I had almost a dozen jars going, each holding a different type of seed. But that was too much work for a couple of birds, so I decided to combine like items. Then it dawned on me to use three jars, for small, medium and large pulses.

Separating pulses by size works nicely because different types of pulses plump at different rates and you may want to feed particular sizes to specific birds. For instance, I feed small seeds such as quinoa and amaranth, which become ready the soonest, to my small birds.

I place most of the rest - sunflower, fenugreek, pine nuts and broccoli - in a medium jar. The largest jar contains almonds and Brazil nuts. I like to segregate the almonds because their leached enzyme inhibitors stain the pine nuts, which doesn't look very appetizing, to me, anyway.

After sorting, I rinse the pulses several times. Then I fill each jar with filtered water, with at least an inch over the top, and let the seeds soak overnight on the counter. The next morning I rinse several more times with cool, filtered water, and do a final rinse with grapefruit seed extract (GSE) or organic apple cider vinegar. (GSE or ACV cleans the pulses of most bacteria, without being absorbed. You should consider using one of these especially if you live in a warmer climate.) Then I refrigerate everything.

The overnight soak starts the process of enzyme inhibitor release. Some pulses, including nuts, grains and beans, need at least 24 hours to release all their tannins, so I continue to rinse them a couple of times a day until the water looks clear.

Otherwise, I rinse the plumped pulses once a day and restore them in the refrigerator in pure water until I'm ready to feed them. Before serving, I rinse the pulses one final time.

If some pulses aren't quite open when you feed them, don’t worry. It's okay to serve them at different stages of readiness because they continue to grow and some will actually split in the dish. Never store germinated seeds more than three days.

Dinner is now served
I feed my birds their pulses at the end of the day because I know they will devour them readily. (The first meal of the day will be Sally's Glop, or Phoebe Linden's Layered Birdie Salad, or Dr. Alicia McWatters' Mash, with healthy snacks such as lightly toasted sprouted grain breads in between.)

To make sure the batch is safe (and okay, I admit it, because I like them, too), I'll eat a couple of the almonds myself before serving. Occasionally I'll sample the seeds and grains as well, checking for rancid or sour smells.

My birds are anxious for this meal and look for the almonds first, so we munch together, making yummy sounds. My "girls" are so spoiled, I have to peel off the outer skin of their almonds for them; then they will devour the sweet, white plump meat, with two tails up and cooing heard from inside the dishes.

I had a rocky beginning trying sprouts, but it has been a learning experience and a joy to share our final success with others. We've moved out of that house with the moldy basement, since it could have caused respiratory problems, too. Now we can be sure our germinated pulses are safe. Our birds enjoy the fruit of this quick harvest of exceptional nutrition and so do we.