Thank you! I'm saving this info so I can do this sometime in the Spring, whenever the weather decides to warm up :) !! pkponder ...do you have a picture? Would love to see it. I want to include a Birdhouse and a Birdfeeder. My Birdfeeder is very large and I hung it last summer and was still out till recently when it needed seed and found out the thing broke at the top where you take it off to add seed ... so I'm mounting it on a pole and it will be just fine that way. It is VERY heavy so I can't have a tall pole for it. I included a picture of my bird feeder. It is 13 x 13 and has 9 feeding stations, 11lb capacity. I want to have a birdhouse separate but not too far away. Have an idea to put these alongside our ramp ... will look nice with some vines I think. :) Also, I know this bird feeder can be pole mounted because a couple people told me about how to do it. I saved that info and it says The pipe needs to be no wider than 7/8 of an inch. Anyway, looking forward to mounting that and I have to find a nice bird house to also mount on a pole. We have lots of cats around here (including ours that goes outside) and squirrels, so I might have to figure a way to keep them out.

You didn't mention any gourds on your vines. What is the condition of the gourds? Have they reached a size that would carry them through to maturity? If there are no gourds, or they are very small, they probably won't make it this year. As for the coffee grounds, and egg shells, we try to add them before the growing season, and work them into the soil. You may have to consider this season a learning season, and try again next year. Jan

keep it watered, it will survive. If it came from a location with some shade, it will sunburn, but the new leaves will be ok. Strelizia is a very tough plant :-) Evelyn

We had a serious problem with crows and the starlings that come with them (sort of like little jackels following their larger black buddies). They would wipe out all our fruit trees by only taking one peck out of each, then tearing off new growth. We tried everything for years (owl dummies, old CDs hanging, bird netting the smaller trees). Nothing worked. Then three years ago we bought some outdoor speakers, ran the wire to our house where we hooked up a MP3 selection (on our computer) of various song birds and various hawk sound bytes and play it early in the morning and occasionally during the day when those black winged gangsters start their fly by. We have never lost any fruit since playing those bird songs and osprey/hawk calls. The good thing is the neighbours don't complain about it as it sounds like a garden full of song birds most of the time. Seems that crows and especially starlings do not like to come around where there is a large active bird population. This year we sacrificed our small orchard to see if NOT playing the sounds had any change. Needless to say, we lost all our cherries, plums, crab apples and much of our new growth on most of our trees. So playing bird sounds really works for us at least. A much more natural and safer alternative to gun warfare.