How To Get Blue In The Winter Garden

Blue is a color gardeners strive for in all seasons, but winter?  How is that possible?  I have gorgeous blue in my garden all winter.  They are bluebirds and every day they come to the garden and feeders.  I feel so lucky to look out and see their bright blue feathered bodies all puffed up from the cold, perched in the dogwood tree.

Mostly it was by mistake, like some of my best work.  The pole for my feeders has three arms, and when a friend gave me another suet feeder, I just hung it with the platform feeder.  The suet feeder just laid on the roof.  Bluebirds prefer to land flat-footed (not perch), so they enjoyed the suet from the rooftop.  What a great “mistake”!

In the front yard I have holly shrubs (Ilex “blue princess”), one male and one female that produces multitudes of berries near the dogwood tree.  The bluebirds will first eat all the berries off the dogwood (Cornus florida), and then go for the holly berries.  To supplement the berries I strap yet another suet feeder to a large branch of the dogwood so again the bluebirds can eat without having to land on the feeder.

We want these birds to stay year round so it’s important to think ahead.  Erect a couple bluebird houses.  Get ones specifically for bluebirds with a small hole and no perch.  I have two, one faces west and one east.  They are on metal posts so cats, raccoons and snakes can’t reach them.  Place them on the edge, where the trees meet the lawn.  This provides cover and open space for insect hunting.  Make sure the houses are ready early, end of February, beginning of March, because the couples start their house hunting early.

If you are fortunate enough to have a couple choose your real estate, you will be blessed with babies around Memorial Day.  In the mean time, the busy parents will be devouring hundreds of insects from your garden.  This has to be the prettiest organic pesticide ever invented!  The years when I have nesting bluebirds, the insect problems in the garden are minimal.  Sometimes I am lucky enough to get two nestings which helps keep the later insect population down.

So plant some shrubs with berries, erect a bluebird house or two and accidentally (on purpose) lay your suet flat.  Then be patient and you too will be rewarded with blue in your garden.  Do nice things for them and they will return the favor tenfold.