The Birds and the Bees

Happy summer everyone! And for those of you who live in the States, happy the 4th of July!

Being in the middle of the week, this July 4th was moderately celebrated. It was breezy and overcast, so I spent most of the day in the garden tidying up. Our salad greens have bolted and were all harvested. Bindweed has found its way into our potato patch – bad! But do not worry, I am on top of it.

Look! we’ve got beans! It is so satisfying to watch everything grow, and trust me, they grow fast. All the hard work of planting and setting up drip irrigation in Spring really paid off – we have been enjoying a steady stream of fresh greens and cut flowers with virtually no maintenance. 🙂 Just today, I noticed that our potato plants started flowering! It is a good sign that the plants are strong and healthy. It also means that Slav is finally getting his young potatoes.

Potato flowers:

Our tomato, cucumber, and beans have been flowering for a few weeks and start bearing fruit. It is a lot later comparing to the harvests we had in North Carolina, but given that we had freezing nights in May, these plants are doing their best.

Our most anticipated harvest is the strawberries. They are doing so well despite of the intense heat and they spread like weeds. I am happy to find that strawberries are perennials in my area – so next year we will plant a whole bed and just let them spread. I am watching these babies like a hawk and try to pick them before birds get them.

Speaking of birds, Slav and I recently set up several birdhouses and feeders around our yard. Slav is big on bird watching and had feeders outside his bedroom window growing up. So we were very excited to see birds showing up in Spring, including this beautiful American Robin.

Robins love earthworms and caterpillars, which we have plenty of. To encourage it to stay, Slav installed a birdhouse that Robins known to love on our Southern gable.

We are not 100% certain about the location, but this is the southeast corner of our house and it is well protected from the harsh northwest wind and winter snow. There is a big Ash tree over this portion of the roof, so it does not get too hot either. I would like it if I were a bird.

As you can see, the birdhouse is fairly open. Apparently Robins likes to nest on shelves, opposed to in closed spaces.

In addition to the American Robin, we also see some black-capped Chickadee flying around the pine tree just outside of our living room window. These handsome little ones sing long and complex songs and we just love how perky and agile they are.

To keep them happy, we put a bird feeder on our living room window, just under the pine tree:

We were initially worried that they would not visit because the feeder is too close to the house. But guess what? This morning we spotted a chickadee eating out of it, while Roxie and I were in the living room!

This brave bird quickly got used to the movement inside and just keeps coming. I see it every morning now.

We also spotted a pair of Mourning Doves in this pine tree. They came a lot in late April, but have since disappeared. Some research tells us that April to early May is the time that male doves show females potential nesting sites, and females will pick one and build the nest. Isn’t that interesting? Just like real estate shopping! I guess our pine tree did not make the cut.

To make our tree more attractive for next Spring (or procrastinating Doves this year), Slav made a big platform/shallow basket with chicken wires and secured it between the branches in the pine tree. That is apparently all these Doves need for starting nests.

Chickadees, Robin, and Doves are what we have seen. But what I really want to attract to my garden is Wren. We have zillions of earwigs, which nibble the tender leaves on my plants. They love our wood chip mulch and are proliferating like crazy underneath. Wrens are the biggest earwig eaters and I want them as bad as Denver wants Amazon. We picked the prettiest wren house and Slav mounted it on the crab apple tree, again, shield from the northwest wind and strong afternoon sun:

I stuffed some cotton balls to the side for birds to nest with. Hopefully we get some Wrens here soon!

To make the backyard more attractive to birds in general, we decided to set up a big bird feeder and a birdbath in our perennial garden.

This location gets good sun all day and is far from all buildings and other trees in our yard. I’ve learned that being in the middle of an open field helps to reduce predators. Roxie and Charlie are good at chasing squirrels away so we do not need to worry about squirrels getting to bird houses or feeders. Finally! These dogs are useful for something besides cleaning mixing bowls.

Don’t you love the blue bird bath? It was a freebie from a neighbor last winter, and all we did to make it functional was to plug a small leak. It holds decent amount of water which we refresh every evening. Slav put a big rock in the middle for little birds to drink safely. Isn’t he the best?

We have a good gathering every morning and this one particular visits often:

The last thing we added to our garden is a bee hotel for leaf-cutter bees. Leaf-cutter bee is one of the native pollinators in Colorado.

If you have not heard leaf-cutter bees, check them out. They are incredible pollinators and work much more effectively than honey bees. Unlike honey bees, they are solitary bees and do not make honey. They are also very gentle and hardly sting. These bees lay eggs in Autumn, which hatch in early summer. They mostly pollinate summer flowers, whereas Mason bees are the native Spring pollinators in our area (which we will be setting up nests for next Spring).

I first heard about the benefit of native bees from Garden Answer, a channel I follow on Youtube. The host of this channel also gardens in Zone 5b and in a dry climate, so I’ve learned a lot about plants suitable for my garden from her videos. Last year she did a great video on setting up native bee hotels. The process of setting up native bee hotel is 100 times easier than setting up honey bee hives, and virtually maintenance-free. Since we are not interested in making our own honey, native bee hotel sounds like a perfect idea to attract pollinators.

As you can see, our first bee hotel is really simple. We just got a handful of reed tubes whose diameters are suitable for leaf cutter bees, and dropped them into a light color PVC tube.

Slav pushed some tree bark in there to make sure that the reed tubing are secure, then hung the whole thing under the shed roof. This spot is sunny but has afternoon shade, and the roof keeps it protected.

I found this clip of leaf-cutter bee cutting an Ash leaf. How amazing! It happens that the two trees next to the shed are both Ash. I am so looking forward to having these bees nesting in our yard.

Just like this, we are thoroughly enjoying the summer of Colorado. We are blessed with blue sky, beautiful sunsets, and cool evening breeze. Hopefully the feeders, houses, and the birdbath make the birds and the bees happy too. We have seen many birds visiting our feeder, but none of them have nested here yet. I will keep you posted!