holiday ideas

Winter Feast for the Birds

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I love the holiday season. Every year I decorate a plant or tree outside my window where I can see it from inside the house. I use edible ornaments that attract small songbirds.  Both fruit-eating and seed-eating birds will appreciate the dietary boost during the lean winter months.  For the fruit-eaters string garlands of dried apples, bananas, hawthorn berries, cranberries and grapes onto sewing thread.  You can also thread them onto wire loops with raw whole peanuts in the shell.  Wire orange slices to the branches.

Seed-eaters relish stalks of ornamental wheat tied to the branches, along with ears of ornamental corn.  The favorite of all the "ornaments" is peanut butter-coated pinecones encrusted with wild birdseed mix and hung with florist wire.  Millet sprays tied to the branches are a hit, too.  Look around your garden for berries that you can use to decorate your tree as a present for the birds. 

While you’re in the decorating mood,  take advantage of this opportunity to .  Cuttings from fir, redwoods,  pine, holly, mahonia, strawberry tree, toyon and cotoneaster parneyi make fine additions to your wreaths and swags.  But don’t whack off snippets indiscriminately.  To reveal the plant’s naturally handsome form, prune from the bottom up and from the inside out.  Avoid ugly stubs by cutting back to the next largest branch or to the trunk.  If the plant has grown too dense, selectively remove whole branches to allow more air and sunlight to reach into the plant.

Be sure to strip the foliage from the portions of the stems that will be under water if you are using the cuttings in a bouquet. 
 

Freeze damage

How to Deal with Early Freeze Damage

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Frozen flakes of rich, yellow ginkgo leaves at the base of my trees wasn’t what I had in mind when I wrote last week’s column.  I watched them land with a soft thud on the frosty ground this morning. When we get a really hard frost some plants do get nipped that normally would be fine in a light frost.  Here’s how to deal with frost damage.

Don’t be tempted to rush out and prune away the damaged parts of the plant.  This winter will have more cold weather and the upper part of your plant, even if damaged, can protect the crown from further freezing. This applies to citrus trees, too.  If a perennial like Mexican sage froze and is now gooey and black, cut the plant down to the ground. It will re-grow come spring from the root system.

If you didn’t get a cover crop planted in your vegetable garden, be sure to cover the soil with a layer of compost as soon as possible.  Leaving the bare earth exposed to the elements, the constant beating of the rain will compact the surface and leach nutrients out of the soil.  Covering the soil with a 3" thick layer of compost will act as a blanket and protect the soil from compaction and slow the rate that moisture penetrates the soil.

At the same time, adding a layer of compost will help improve soil quality. In spring you can leave the compost as a mulch to help prevent weeds or you can work it into the soil as an amendment.

container gardening, hummingbird plants

Winter containers for Birds

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Outside my window there’s a feast going on. The gingko trees are clothed in bright yellow leaves right now but soon they will drop every leaf on almost the same day and cover the ground like carpeting.  It’s a feast for the eyes.   Hopping among the branches even as I write this is a tiny greyish-olive bird with a white eye ring looking for insects.  It’s either a kinglet or a vireo.  I wish I were a better backyard birder.  The Anna’s hummingbird is also here looking for food.  What plants provide food for winter birds and also give the garden color at the same time?

Why not plant some containers that look great and will supply food for your winged visitors?   Grevillea Canberra Gem is blooming now and is a hummingbird favorite.   Combine it with winter blooming annuals like primroses or pansies and violas.    It’s always amusing to me how much the mail order catalongs from the East Coast can command for a tiny primrose division and we here in California can find them plentiful and inexpensive. 

Mahonia or Oregon grape will be blooming soon and their yellow flowers  would look great with golden Iceland poppies. Many of their leaves are purplish or bronze now that the nights have gotten cold and are very colorful.  Hummingbirds favor their flowers and many songbirds eat the delicious berries.

Penstemon are a favorite garden perennial and bloom late in the year attracting hummingbirds.  Some are short-lived but the variety, Garnet, is an exception.  Combine it with white cyclamen for a traditional holiday look.

For those really dark places, fragrant sarcococca is perfect combined with red primroses and will be blooming very soon. You can smell their perfume from a long distance. Hellebores bloom in the winter, too, and offer texture in your containers.  A variegated osmanthus will hold up in even our harshest weather and would be a show stopper in a Chinese red container.  

Dwarf nandina is perfect in winter containers,  especially now that their foliage has taken on red and orange tints.  Combine them  with a grass like orange sedge or reddish bronze carex buchananii.

Mexican Bush sage pairs beautifully with the deep golden flowers of Mexican marigold.  Both of these perennial shrubs grow to 3 ft tall and as wide and bloom in winter.  Hummingbirds love bush sage and I’ve seen them bloom right through January unless we have a hard frost.

If you have room for a small evergreen tree in the garden, consider the . It is easy to grow and has year round interest. In the fall and winter, clusters of small white or pink urn-shaped flowers attract Anna’s hummingbirds. Fruit resembling strawberries ripen in the fall and attract other birds.

Plant a feast for your eyes and for our feathered friends, too.

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