The self-planted garden
Whether pro or con is a matter of personal preference, but one side effect of putting out so much seed for birds is the inevitability of some of it germinating in your garden. This spring, our little feeding station was completely overtaken by sunflowers…and two corn stalks. I happen to love sunflowers, so I was quite happy. Our attempt at planting a “wildflower in a box” did not work out very well, and most of the area had been overtaken by dandelions and thistle anyway.
Last week, my children dissected a sunflower which was very interesting. We discovered an entire microcosm on the head of the plant. Numerous tiny insects were crawling over it, and one had burrowed into the stem. We saw the developing seeds and wondered how long it would be until they matured.
That question seems to have been answered. Our garden was full of American goldfinches today, busily combing over the sunflowers, looking for seeds. I wasn’t able to get a good picture because the sunflowers are growing up against the house so the birds fly off every time I try to get a picture. We’ll see if I have more luck tomorrow! More flowers which provide food for native birds:
thistle (goldfinches eat the seed and use the down in their nests…but your neighbors may not appreciate you much!)
dandelion (similar to thistle!)
a variety of berries (if you don’t mind sharing)
crab apples
honeysuckle
cone flowers
black-eyed susans
The other benefit of gardening with native birds in mind is that many of these plants are much hardier than ornamental plants. They do not require as much watering, are more resistant to disease and are less likely to be driven out by weeds.
gardening, sunflower, birding, backyard birding, birdwatching, goldfinch
July 27th, 2007 at 9:34 am
We have quite a field of thistle growing behind our garage! LOL It took me awhile to make the connection between those and the seed I was feeding to the finches! ha!
I love reading your bird posts!
Sherry
July 27th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Thanks, Sherry! Thistle can be hard to get rid of, but if you check the package, you should be able to find black Nyjer. Finches actually prefer it and the seeds have been heat sterilized.
July 28th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
I do like plants that don’t require a lot of care.-I lost track of this blog as I was looking though some of your other interesting blogs.-It’s hard enough to do one.-How can you do so many?
July 28th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Thanks, Larry. I really only keep up with two. One is a sort of school project my daughter and I do as part of her history lesson. There are some others out there that are technically mine but were abandoned when I started to figure out this blogging thing!
I love your blog and will be getting a link to it in my sidebar soon, I hope. I’m behind on getting my links together, but it finally at least made it onto my to do list!
July 28th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
When we moved in April, we dug up quite a few plants from the flowerbed (we were renting and not leaving my expensive to replace, well grown plants behind - many I had started as seeds, but, I digress). We have always had plenty of “extra” plants in our flower beds, thanks to the bird feeders. What was funny, was the plants that we moved, well, we unknowingly brought along some hitchhikers. Some beautiful sunflowers, plenty of catnip (we use for fun with the cats and med. for the humans), and various other hitchhiking plants (including some thistle). We had lots of extra plants that we had no idea that we brought with us! Too much fun!
On another note, we saw, up close, our very first Hummingbird today by our front steps - checking out the geraniums! Our 8 year old spotted it. I need to offload the picture I took from the camera to the computer to see how the picture turned out. We had always tried to get hummingbirds in our “yard” at our old apartment, but there were some semi-wild cats in the area that effectively kept them away (did not scare the finches, though, LOL!).
July 28th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
That’s wonderful, Melisa! If you post them to your blog, please let me know in case I miss it. We get hummingbirds, but I’m yet to capture one on film.
I can’t even get the goldfinches looking for seeds on the sunflowers!
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