Hi All I have been following your postings and thought I would add one to the growing list. I have both the orange an the white birds. I got my orange to bloom for the first time this year (Year #3). What I did was keep it root bound (till it pushed the soil out of the pot on top) and then replanted it into a two inch larger pot. This got me a lot of new leaves but no flowers. Next I tried feeding it bone meal (6/6/6) at a rather large doseage (one teaspoon per week with lots of water). Within two months I had a bud (August 2007)then on October 13, 2007 I got the first flower. Fast forward to November 15, 2007 and I'm seeing number seven flower from the same pod. My plants sit all year in a sun room faceing East with the birds only getting a couple hours of morning sun. As for the white bird no blooms yet. I have seen one in bloom and it had close to eight feet of stem with 40 or fifty leaves that had been removed so it was hard to quess it's age. No one at the nursery could tell me either. Mine has 8 to 12 inches of stem and maybe 10 or so removed leaves and its 5+ years old. I guess it has a ways to go yet.

I used to have bird feeders, but not since we have had an active population of black bears. While I like having them around, I don't want to train them to think that our house = food. Although the bears hibernate, they are awake before there are many food sources for seed eaters, and I hate to habituate the birds to my feeders and then have to remove them in early spring. I do want to put out a heated bird bath for winter, though, and may try a suet feeder since about the time I would have to bring in the feeder due to the bears waking up, there would be insects available for the suet eaters. We do have a lot of birds, but they don't spend as much time near the house as they would if we had feeders. I do plant for the birds and often have nests in shrubs near the house, seed eating birds on plants where I've let the seed heads stand, and insect eaters in the shrubbery. Purple martins eat flying bugs, so that is one of the reasons folks put up houses for them. Since you plan to put up bird houses, read up about the requirements for a house that the birds will use, the preferred size openings for different birds, and how best to site them since different types of birds look for different set-ups. Here's some general information on bird houses from the National Wildlife Federation: http://www.nwf.org/How-to-Help/Garden-for-Wildlife/Gardening-Tips/Attracting-Nesting-Birds.aspx The link below is from Cornell University Lab of Ornithology's Project Nest Watch. If you go to the LEARN tab in the upper right part of the page, there are various articles about bird houses and landscaping for bird habitat that you may find useful. Until you have more shrubs or small trees near your feeders for landing spots, you can put a lage tree branch or old Christmas tree in a pot and fill the pot with rocks or gravel to hold it in place. Here is a link that might be useful: Cornell's Project Nest Watch

Christopher, With corn, I mulch the area lightly with hay. You also could use grass clippings except they're less likely to be available at spring planting time, although they would be for fall planting time. The corn grows up through the hay, but the crows don't seem to recognize green corn seedlings in the middle of tan-to-buff-colored hay the same way that they recognize green corn seedlings in bare soil. I almost never lose a single corn seedling. Another old trick, but one that I think is much harder to pull off is to sprout garlic cloves indoors in flats early in spring and transplant it to the area where you're going to seed corn. The birds see the garlic sprouts, think they are corn (especially if you grow the corn in the same place every year), pull them up and discover--yuck!--they are not corn. Then you come back a couple of weeks later and plant corn which the birds leave alone because they think it is garlic. I think the success of this is more variable because you could have birds visit your corn who missed the round of garlic earlier. Some people swear by it though Beans are harder because everything here in the country wants to eat beans, and if I mulch them with hay, it just gives bean-sprout-eating insects a place to hide. So, I start every single bean inside in paper cups and transplant them outside. Tedious? Definitely. Time-consuming? Absolutely. However, as long as I put Slug-Go Plus or an equivalent product on the ground around the newly-transplanted seedings, the pillbugs and sowbugs (my biggest pest in spring) don't eat the seedlings. I do put a toothpick very close to each seedling at planting time to deter cutworms too. And, the garden is fenced, so rabbits generally can't get the bean seedlings. I don't think I've ever had birds bother bean seedlings. If I transplant carefully and I don't lose any seedlings due to my own clumsiness, then I have nice full rows with no gaps so that is a plus too. Until I started transplanting bean seedlings I had a huge problem with all the wild things getting the beans and/or young bean seedlings. I don't have those issues now. One way to protect any newly seeded bed from birds is to hammer in a few stakes and string fishing line in a random pattern (imagine a man-made spider web although not with the precision patterns seen in many spider webs) between the stakes. The lighter/less visible the fishing line the better because you want the birds to fly down to steal the seeds or seedlings and be 'spooked' by hitting the fishing line instead. This works best if the line is fairly close to the ground to the birds cannot land on the ground and walk under the line. After the seedlings are up and rooted well enough that the birds can't yank them up out of the ground, you remove the fishing line and stakes. I also 'bribe' wild birds of all types to leave my garden alone by putting little piles of bird seed just outside the garden fence. They feed daily at the seed and leave my plants alone, although some of them stick around, sit on the tomato cages and catch bugs. I use hen scratch, cracked corn and black oil sunflower seeds in rotation so the birds never know exactly what to expect, but you could use any wild bird seed mix. I have a scarecrow--in fact, 2 of them, made by a friend with whom I've shared garden produce for years and even though the scarecrows are a nice addition to the garden, the birds are not the least bit afraid of them. With some birds, one of those sprinklers that is motion activated scares them off, but I think other birds set it off on person so they can play in the water. Anything that moves, like bird flash tape, pinwheels, fluttering pieces of surveyor's tape, dangling aluminum pie pans or CDs, etc., the birds seem smart enough to figure them out and lose their fear of them after a while. My cats don't even keep all the birds out of the garden. I think it is because I feed a lot of wild birds and scold the cats if they 'stalk' them, and my cats know they shouldn't bother the birds. Some people have garden cats that keep birds out of the garden, but my cats just don't do that, although they do keep rodents away. That's about all I can think of other than bird netting, which is moderately effective, but sure can be a hassle for the gardener. Good luck--I hope you find some workable solutions. Dawn

A couple things I do to help the birds during their nesting time is give them places to build their nest. Doves only put down a couple sticks before laying their eggs so I give them platforms that are sort of saucer shaped — to keep the eggs in the nest. I just take 1/4 in square screen, cut a 8x8 inch piece and bend the ends over canes so it doesn’t fall. Also works great on metal arches. I also place them up under the over hang of the roof on our buildings. That way they are out of the rain. Make sure they have more than one easy escape opening. Robins like the roses but they do need a bunch of the canes close to each other so they can place their nest in the ‘hole’. You may want to tie some canes together if your bushes don’t have any. Also if you have a cane sticking straight up with off shoots that form a cone just cut the center cane out leaving just the cone. They can build their nest in it without it falling out. Wrens will fill your bird houses with small sticks so other birds can't use them if the houses are close to each other.