The Wildlife-Friendly Vegetable Gardener by Tammi Hartung

Author:Tammi Hartung
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: grow food, vegetables, coexist with wildlife, environment, create wildlife habitats, beneficial relationships, smart planting, plant, sow, pollinators, garden habitat, harvest, nature, gardening with nature, beneficial insects
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2013-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Don’t Be So Tidy

An easy way to provide food is to leave all the seed heads and stalks on perennial plants through the winter. The seeds offer a nutritious food supply to birds, small mammals such as squirrels and raccoons, and even deer to some extent. Plus the birds collect bits and pieces of leaves, twigs, stalks, seed-hair fluff, and so on, which they expertly weave into nests in which to raise their young.

Resist the urge to tidy up the garden in late fall. As an added benefit, the dead stalks of perennials offer protection to a plant’s crown in winter, helping to shield it from the harshest winds and intense sunlight when there’s no snow cover. The extra protection may also reduce winter kill. I do remove the annuals that have finished their growing season. They can harbor diseases, and I don’t want them to spread unwanted seeds throughout the garden.

Chris and I love to watch the birds, so most of these little bird gardens are located where we can see them from windows throughout the house and the back porch. However, they are more than places from which to watch the birds, even though that is quite nice. The wild birds are an integral part of our conservation and pestmanagement protocols both for our food gardens and for our perennial-seed crops. They are a formalized part of our USDA organic-certification plan, too. We want the birds around in abundance so that they will forage on the pests that might otherwise cause us a great deal of trouble by damaging our food plants and seed crops. By leaving the task of pest management in the beaks of the wild birds, we find that there are very few times when we have to manage pests through other measures like organic pesticides.

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