Birds are a nuisance in my garden when my plants are young. They will pull up or peck off all my seedlings if I don't cover everything with bird netting. Now that things are established, my netting is gone. I see them hopping around the beds, but they don't bother anything. I've never had them peck at my tomatoes, but I've heard from people who think they do.

So...take your pick. I do have a bird bath in my garden. I don't keep it full at planting time, as I don't care to encourage them until my plants are big enough to handle having them around.

As for putting feeders in your garden, on the opposite side of my house I have an actual bird garden, with several feeders, another bird bath, and shrubs and trees planted specifically with a bird habitat in mind. I absolutely love it--it's the view out my kitchen window. But the birds make a MESS. The area needs to be kept clean, I soak my feeders in a mild bleach solution every couple months. I sweep up and gather the seed shells. Birds carry disease and a poorly kept bird garden can help spread the disease to other birds and humans.

The point of all this is that I would never want to put feeders near plants I'm growing for food. A few birds hopping around aren't a big deal, but birds in the volume I get in my bird garden, I wouldn't put anything growing out there in my mouth. They crap on everything. In fact, I garden with gloves and wash my hands after I've been out there.

I also have to let my feeders stay empty for several days to keep the bird volumes down. I love them, but when there's a plentiful supply of food for a long period of time, it turns into an Alfred Hitchcock movie out there.

Personally, if you're looking for something that eats bugs, I'd try encouraging other beneficial insects by planting marigolds, nasturtiums and other "gardeny" type flowers. And, of course, keep the use of pesticides down.

I do have a small bird bath in my garden and rigged up an emitter for dripping water. It attracts mostly the catbirds, which do eat a lot of bugs, but they love fruit, too. We have so many wild berries around that they don't bother the vegetables too much, but they will peck a tomato now and then. We do have to cover up seedlings of chard, beets, and a few other things, because I think the birds think they are little red worms and eat them.

I'm loving the toads in my garden. I put broken clay pots upside down in the mulch for toad houses, have a shallow saucer on the ground filled with rocks and water for a moist area (flushed every two days due to the mosquitoes) and if I find one on the deck, he/she is immediately transported to the garden so the dogs don't trample it.

I've read that toads will eat between 50-100 bugs, flies, slugs, cutworms, grasshoppers, etc. a night, so they are more than welcome to stay and eat at the buffet :-)

My neighbours seem to be having a contest of how many birdhouses they can erect on their properties...I don't have ONE, but I do have a garden, so the birds use it as a convenient salad bar. Can't say as I'd welcome birds into my yard, but I don't actively chase them away either. If I don't cover the peas and beets as they emerge, I don't think I'd get a crop at all.

My birdbath is not in my veggie garden, but it gets some animal that washes off its food in it (racoons?). It can get pretty gross overnight, depending on what they've had for dinner, lol. I often find cooked chicken bones, apparently pilfered from the neighbors' trash.

I wouldn't want one near my food garden, no. I do clean it out all the time and have it for the birds in general, though. I have so many bugs here that I do like having lots of birds. They bother my fruit without intervention but not the few veggies I grow (tomatoes, eggplants, different squashes, okra, lots of herbs, sometimes peppers).

I have no problems with the birds except the TURKEYS!!!!!!!
They found my winter plantings last year when we were gone for a weekend and tore up the 2 winter beds!
Things still grew, but we had no idea what was what as we had planted several things that were new to us!
Personally, I love to watch the birds from my seat looking out on the garden! I have a birdbath just outside my sliding glass door. Most of the birds don't mess with things. Nancy

I love birds. They are my garden pets. Now that tomatoes are growing, I am giving them lots of water containers under the plants. I have no idea what they eat. They just keep hopping around all day and picking something. Mostly they are just trying to feed their young. I like them even more because they are alert and kind of shy, not rude. And they get to know you.

For me, it's sort of a double edge sword. I love having a bird sanctuary in my yard....but every year I curse them. When you say "should I bring birds to my garden" are you asking about attracting them directly to just your vegetable patch, or your whole yard? I would never put a feeder in my vegetable garden because the seeds get scattered everywhere and make weeding a harder chore than it already is. A bird bath....easy enough to fill every time you water if that's where you place it. I have my bird-things in the front of the house and my garden in the back. Yes, first thing in the spring I do lose seedlings to foraging birds. Yes, birds do make a terrible mess with their food and their poop. And yes, they eat just as many beneficial insects as the nasties. My first wave of strawberries always goes to the birds. (Netting helps, but it is a pain in the butt). I have exactly 2 hours to get a cherry off my tree on peak-ripe day. If I wait 3 hours....cherries GONE! So why attract birds? For me, they are so entertaining, lovely and when I'm working my yard it sounds like I'm listening to a musical year round. But I don't have just a "few" birds. I have managed to attract hundreds....if not thousands....so I may not be the right person to chime in, here.

Personally, I would recommend against attracting birds with a bird feeder, because:
(a) if you attract seed eaters to your garden, they will eat seeds there too... as well as seedlings & tender shoots.
(b) bird feeders attract squirrels as well, and you do NOT want squirrels feeling at home in your garden! Elevating the feeder is ineffective, because they will still come to eat the seeds knocked to the ground by bird activity.
(c) I agree with Loribee's comments regarding bird droppings, especially if you enjoy eating vegetables raw (as I do).

For many years, I had large numbers of goldfinches in my rural garden, since the property owners had bird feeders elsewhere. At first I welcomed their presence, but they began to cause serious damage to some of my greens.

The birds you want to attract to your garden are insect eaters. For the most part, if your garden has a large population of the insects they want, they will come of their own accord. Building bird houses for insect eaters can be helpful, my uncle built a "bird hotel" for purple martins on a pole just outside his garden, and they picked off large numbers of flying insects.

If I wanted to bait with anything, it would be suet, since fat-based feeding is more likely to attract insect eaters. Unfortunately, finches can take a liking to it as well.

AFAIK even seed eaters feed their chicks on protein rich insect and larval foods. I welcome any birds to my garden that want to come. To me it's worth netting the berries and protecting seedlings to have birds around to enjoy watching and to keep down larvae, etc. I like to see how a robin will often accompany me when I'm weeding or digging watching for any tasty morsels I turn up. (European Robin, not the same as the American robin). In our tiny overcrowded island gardens are an extremely important habitat for birds.

Some years we have tried to feed the birds year round. Other years, they disappear after the first month of spring feeding and we stop filling the feeders until the Fall.

This year, with new larger vegetable beds, that had a fair amount of directly sown seed, I stopped filling the feeders a little sooner than usual. I definitely didn't want the squirrels in the yard who seem to enjoy disturbing seedlings in the ground and in pots sometimes.

But even with the feeders not filled, we seem to still be attracting a fair amount of birds. I've seen a pair of catbirds, and I think I saw and heard a pair of Carolina wrens the other day. We have English sparrows all the time, which I'm not that thrilled about, but tolerate them rather than struggle to keep them out of the yard.

We do have a birdbath, three of them that we keep filled. I would feel awful not to offer water to birds in an area where there is really no bodies of water very close by. I love to watch them and really enjoy the sound of them. BUTâ¦this year, we have new large trellises made of cattle panels for the vegetables and it ended up they are directly across from the bird bath, so the birds are perching on the trellis and leaving droppings. I'm considering moving the bird bath away from the vegetable garden, hoping that will keep them from using the trellises as perches.