Finishing the Bird Garden

Our bird garden has turned out to be a much bigger project than we ever anticipated! We thought it would be done in a couple of months, but here we are, one year later, finally with an end in sight! It was too hot to work outside in the summer, so this has been primarily a spring-fall-spring project for us.

Spring 2008 and fall 2008 were mainly about planting. During Phase One we put many trees and shrubs into the ground, focusing on those that are known to provide shelter and food for a variety of birds. Our neighbor built us a lovely feeding station and we have enjoyed many hours watching birds at the platform feeder, on the suet and peanut feeders and on the mixed seed feeder.


My dad and I installed drip lines to water the plants. This enables me to water all the plants simultaneously with one turn of the hose, and it ensures that water goes all the way down to the roots. I love the drip line system!

Now we are in the final phase. The boys are working very diligently to finish this project, as they have a desire to enter it into a local arm of the Keep America Beautiful competition. This was their dream and their vision from the start, and they have worked hard to bring it to fruition. We have many feathered friends visiting daily now, and often we see or hear new species that haven't come to our yard in the past. This phase, though, is about putting the finishing touches on to make this extra appealing to the birds, as well as making the garden attractive to humans. We want it to be a place that we will enjoy sitting in, as we watch the birds flitting from tree to tree or feeding on seeds.

Hummingbird Hollow
Up till now, all our plantings have focused on songbirds. Last week we dug up an area at one edge of the garden and planted lantana, spirea, and butterfly bushes. We also put some hummingbird feeders there. The boys have nicknamed this part of the garden Hummingbird Hollow.

The Dust Bath
The boys were keen to put in a dust bath. Birds like to "bathe" themselves in dust, and it helps their feathers. We've seen birds doing this before and wanted to build our own. The boys dug out a large hole this week, about 6 inches deep and about 2' x 2' square. They filled it with equal parts sifted ash, sand and dirt from the hole, and lined the edge with rocks. We placed a small feeder, low to the ground, to help draw the birds' attention. This has been one of their favorite projects!


Brush pile and rock piles
Some birds like to forage in brush piles or under rocks for insects, so the boys constructed some of each.

Water features
The boys have dreamed of putting in a pond, but I have said that they can do that when they are all old enough to dig it and maintain it themselves. For now, we put up one birdbath near the house, and plan to put out another bird bath deeper in the garden soon.

They have also put out nesting materials, such as feathers, cut bits of string from a string mop and some unprocessed cotton fibers that are in a hanging cage (this was a gift that someone purchased for them at a birding specialty store).

Hummingbird Hollow
Up until now, all of our plant selections have focused on songbirds. We saved one small area of the garden for hummingbirds, and planted it this week. We put in some lantana, some butterfly bushes (including some which I transplanted from our butterfly garden in the back yard), some Bridal Wreath (spirea), and filled it out with several blueberry bushes for songbirds. We put another feeding station in hummingbird hollow: it is a tall pole with hooks on it, from which we've hung two hummingbird feeders.

More new plantings
We have several holly bushes, leyland cypress, Little Giant pines, Little Gem magnolias, crepe myrtle, snowball bushes, and other trees and shrubs already planted, but we still had a wish list of a few more. Last week we were able to get the blueberry bushes we wanted, as well as four tall, spiky grasses. I don't know their name (I thought they were Pampas, but they don't have the feathery top). These grasses grow several feet tall and some birds like to hide in them. We also planted a flowering cherry tree.

We put an order in at our local greenhouse for a Flowering Dogwood tree, a Washington Hawthorne, some weigela, and more spirea. Tomorrow we hope to fill the last four holes dug in spring 2008 if some of these trees and shrubs have come in. We have had some empty black planting buckets sitting in the holes over the past year to keep them from filling up too much with leaves and debris.

Final projects
We spent much of last week working on making the bird garden more functional and attractive for us. We put down groundcloth for weed protection in the flower beds (especially hummingbird hollow), and covered it all with mulch. The kids hauled what seemed to be literally tons of rock, gleaned from other places in our yard, and used it to line all the paths and beds throughout the garden. It was a big job, but fortunately (?) our soil has lots of small and large boulders. We even have some that are big enough to sit on, but we haven't managed to get any of those over to the bird garden. All this rock didn't seem fortunate when we were working on digging holes and planting, but it has saved us a lot of money and time on edging. The garden has a very natural, rustic look with all the rock, and we all feel a sense of pride that we did this ourselves with rock from our own property.


Building the Garden Path
Once we outlined the entire path and all the beds in rock it was time to mulch the path and all the flower beds. We purchased mulch in contrasting colors, mulching all the paths through the garden in red and the flower beds in brown cypress. We initially wanted to lay stepping stones but that proved too expensive. Using mulch was a cost effective and simple way to construct the garden path. My oldest son already knew how to lay down ground cloth and spread mulch, and we think the path turned out fantastic. It was easier and less expensive than many of the other alternatives we had considered.

We placed an old bench and a couple of children's outdoor chairs in the garden, and we purchased a new bench that we have yet to put together.

Finishing Touches
This week is about taking care of all the finishing touches before the boys submit their project application on Wednesday.

Each of the boys built birdhouses with their grandpa, intended for drawing different kinds of birds to the garden. We got those hung today, and the boys were proud. They had a Bluebird house, a Chickadee house, and a Tufted Titmouse house which we hung. We have not hung their Purple Martin house yet as we are trying to figure out a way to get it high enough. I am thinking of drilling it to the top of our wooden swingset.


The boys also have named each part of the garden, and they want to construct small signs with names like "Hummingbird Hollow", "Robin Road", "Dove Dust Bath", "Nuthatch Neighborhood", and the like. Our oldest son plans to put small signs at the base of each tree with its English and scientific name. He had fun today hanging a Tree Face to give the garden some whimsical personality!

Although we won't be using stepping stones throughout the garden paths, the boys each wanted to make one stepping stone out of concrete. We are studying Ancient Rome right now and they had the idea of doing a different bird mosaic on each of the stones and displaying them in the garden. I've never worked with concrete before, but I hope to complete that project with them in April. It won't be in time for the competition, but I know it will be fun, and a great way for the boys to tie some of their history studies in with this big science project!

For more photos and details about what we did, see my past posts on this project:

Our Bird Garden

Fruits of the Bird Garden

Empowering Kids to Run with Their Ideas

Fruits of the Bird Garden

We've had so much success spotting birds this past week that we've been getting up before dawn almost every day to see what we can find in the yard. The boys have enjoyed lots of birding, finding old favorites and spotting some new finds, as well. We continue to marvel at how many more birds we are seeing with our multi-purpose feeding station, built for us by a kind neighbor, Mr. S.

There is a platform feeder with black oil sunflower seeds, a hanging nut feeder, a mixed seed feeder with a roof on top and a hummingbird feeder. Looking out the window right now I can see a ruby throated hummingbird, two cardinals, a chickadee, an Eastern Towhee and two mourning doves, each perched on a different feeder or eating seeds from the ground.

Our bird garden, now 4 months old, is the perfect spot for these birds to take cover, and the feeding station gets even more visitors thanks to its perfect spot. The Rose Breasted Grosbeaks have continued to come back daily, along with mockingbirds and our other usual visitors. In fact, today we had two male Rose breasted Grosbeaks as well as the female. We've seen two woodpeckers this week as well, in or near the bird garden (not at the feeding station).

Tonight K and I heard a cerulean warbler and a hooded warbler in a wooded area down the street, but we could never spot either one.

Now that the weather has cooled, we are ready for phase two of our bird garden project. There are still several holes (dug in the spring) awaiting trees or shrubs, and we want to put a gravel path and some benches in, as well as a water feature. There is some discrepancy about that, as I want a simple bird bath whereas the boys want to dig a pond! I think birdbath will win out, and they can put a pond in later, when they are big enough to dig it and maintain it themselves!

The boys each built a birdhouse, aimed at attracting a particular bird, with the help of their grandfather. We have a purple martin house, a towhee house and a finch house. I hope to get those put up in the bird garden this month, as well.

I had also planned to transplant several butterfly bushes, but it looks like I may not need to. I can see where it looks like some have come up on their own, probably spreading from the butterfly garden in the backyard.

Our bird garden

We are planting a bird garden. This is a huge project for us, so it is a work in progress. We cleared a big area on one side of our house. It had been mostly scrubby weeds before, lots of briars and yucky stuff. I know the birds liked it as it was, and I didn't want to clear it in the first place. Someone is building a house next door, though, and they were doing a lot of clearing. My husband felt like we had to clean that area up, so that it wouldn't look like there was a jungle between us and them.

Once some of the brush was cleared, we started getting the garden laid out. We saved several stands of tall trees, including some dead ones. The woodpeckers love the dead trees, so we didn't take down any dead trees at all, other than one which was threatening to fall on the house.

We hired someone with a power auger to drill holes in our tough, rocky Georgia soil. They dug 40 holes, and we are in the process of digging about 20 more small ones. We have purchased lots of trees and shrubs which birds love, as well as transplanting several from my mom's property and our own.

So far, the boys and I have put in 5 Little Gym magnolia trees, two holly bushes, two crape myrtle, several pines (Leyland Cypress and Little Giants), some tiger lilies, hydrangeas, Nandina, and snowball bushes. We have some Rose of Sharon and 3 southern magnolias which we plan to put in the ground today.

We are working on weeding our existing butterfly garden. Once that is done, we plan to transplant several of our butterfly bushes to the outer edges of the bird garden, turning that area into two separate hummingbird gardens. The tiger liles are there already, and our kind neighbor built us a lovely feeding station which holds 3 bird feeders.

Right now we have out a screen feeder with black oil sunflower seeds, a covered feeder with a seed mix, and a peanut feeder. Soon we will put a safflower feeder and a humming bird feeder in that area, as well.

Each of the boys has built a birdhouse to attract a certain type of bird. Their Papa helped them do that to meet specific criteria needed by each species. We plan to put those in this area, too, as well as some additional feeders, one or two birdbaths, a bench, and an arbor for climbing vines.

My dad and I spent a couple of days putting in a drip irrigation system. This is an inexpensive set of lines that run from the hose to each plant, allowing each one to get a deep watering by turning on just one hose. This is important in our drought-ridden climate. We have heavy watering restrictions, and it isn't good conservation to waste tons of water doing each plant individually with a gushing hose. Installing the lines wasn't as hard as I feared it would be, and it is much cheaper than an in-ground system.

I have ordered two more hollies, and I still have several holes to fill. I plan to get some flowering dogwoods, which I love. They do well in this climate and the birds like them. Other than that, I am not sure what to fill the other holes with, so I am taking some time to pore over all my bird garden books, including the newest one, Attracting Birds to Southern Gardens.

I am a relatively new birder and a very novice gardener. Books like this one help me to think through the complicated process of choosing plants which will attract certain birds, be well situated to our climate, tolerate a largely "hands off" approach (which is what this garden will be once school starts up again), provide for both nesting and food needs, and other factors. With a limited amount of space and money for this project, we need every plant to "count".

Today was the first time we have started to see the fruits of our labors. We began this project about 3 weeks ago and the birds are starting to find the trees and feeding station. We had several cardinals, a tufted titmouse and a mockingbird on our feeding trays this morning. We also saw some chipping sparrows on the ground around it, an Eastern Phoebe in one of the trees, an American crow, and two squirrels climbing up one of the magnolias. As I am typing this, I can hear a Carolina wren, and we hear Eastern Towhees now, too. I trust that as we plant more trees and put out food and water stations we will begin to see and hear much more. I'm looking forward to "phase two" of this plan, when we will begin attracting hummingbirds, as well.

This has been a wonderful project to do with my boys. We ended our school year at the beginning of May. We set aside one month to do Phases 1 and 2 of this project. It would have been impossible if we had done all the heavy labor of clearing the brush and drilling the holes ourselves. But with that work done, we should have all the trees and shrubs (over 60 including the saplings and transplants from my mom's extensive garden and our own butterfly garden out back) in the ground within the month's time frame. Phase 1 was getting everything prepared and getting the bird garden plants in. Phase 2 will be transplanting everything needed for the hummingbird garden from our butterfly garden out back.

Phase 3 will probably be done when the weather cools off in the fall. We have plans to put in a gravel path, get the bench and arbor into the garden, lay down a pad of pavers for a bird bath station, and put in some railroad ties and pavers to make a path for the boys down a hill which is unsuitable for planting but needs some erosion control measures.

The best thing about this garden has been doing it with the boys. My husband's back is bad, so he hasn't helped at all. My boys are 11, 8, 6 and 3 and each one of them has had a significant hand in digging holes, filling them with dirt, pulling weeds, and choosing plants. We are enjoying this time together, bringing our dream to fruition. This is "conservation in action", a very valuable lesson for my boys and something we will always remember doing. We can't do much on any given day, but we chip away at accomplishing our goal, little by little.

I know 10 years from now, as we sit on our bench under the arbor, watching many species of birds enjoying this lovely garden, we will look back and remember our our "day of small things" with fondness.