Protecting Berries from Birds

Red Breasted Birds do not only catch our attention with their bold red plumage, but also offer fascinating insights into the diverse avian life. Let’s explore a few of these remarkable Birds with Red Chest.

Flowers are usually the first things that grab our attention when we are selecting plants to add to our landscapes. However, most plants only flower for a short period of time, so it behooves us to consider plants’ other attributes—and there are many! Sometimes the same flowers that seduced us into opening our wallets are replaced with an amazing fruit display. Colorful fruits of all shapes and sizes can add drama to our landscapes throughout the year. In addition to their visual beauty, many fruits are important sources of nutrition for wildlife, particularly birds. Here are a few examples of awesome plants whose fruit shines in the garden in summer, fall, and winter.

As the country begins taking stock of the damage caused by hurricane Ophelia and works to restore power to much of Scotland and Northern England, gardeners throughout the country are lamenting the destruction of their gardens.

Birds make a great addition to your garden, they’re great to look at and they’re useful as well. For instance, they will eat slugs, snails, aphids, insects and other well-known troublemakers.

Pyracantha, can be a neat shrub with attractive flowers and magnificent red, yellow or orange berries. The white flowers in summer are followed by autumn and winter berries, in fact my shrubs are still in berry this March.

Hippophae Rhamnoides also called Sea Buckthorn, is related to Elaeganeous and is shown here and below with it’s heavy crop of attractive Apricot coloured berries. The shrub can grow to over 15 feet but makes a nice ornamental feature. It flowers in spring followed by narrow silvery leaves through summer. Each plant is either male or female and you need both for pollination and only the female produces these great berries.

Some plants give double pleasure by producing berries after their flowers have already performed. Here is my top 5:

Specimen tree sheltered by High Hedge

Evergreen trees and shrubs are prone to unsightly damage from winter storms. They can be splayed open like a blooming onion or flattened like a pancake by the weight of heavy snow or ice loads. Damaged shrubs sometimes resurrect themselves in a matter of days or weeks; other times, they require severe pruning and a long restoration period. Fortunately, diligent gardeners can take a few actions to prevent serious damage.

These days, my phone keeps ringing about ponds clogged with aquatic weeds and algae. If your pond’s surface is more than 20% covered with weeds or algae, you should work with a pond management company to tackle the issue. An additional step toward the prevention of this issue is tracking down the cause. Aquatic weed growth and algal blooms are usually caused by excess nutrients in the water. These nutrients come from many different sources, but common sources are sedimentation from shoreline erosion and the transport of excess nutrients from fertilizers through stormwater runoff.

The horticultural world lost Rick Berry, a remarkable plantsman, in November. I had the honor of being Rick’s friend and sharing years of plant exchanges and stories. Looking back, my last visit in April 2021 to Rick’s nursery, Goodness Grows in Lexington, GA, was a poignant one.

Garden visitors, average early January 2015 day:30 dark-eyed juncos 11 goldfinches 1 male Eastern bluebird 3 Northern cardinals 5 white-throated sparrows 12 American robins 7 mourning doves 9 blue jays 3 tufted titmice 6 black-capped chickadees 2 white-breasted nuthatches 1 red-bellied woodpecker 2 downy woodpeckers 1 hairy woodpecker 1 yellow-belli