The Birds

We expanded our garden this year. It's ridiculous how much bigger it is. The reasons behind the expansion will make for an entire post that I'll have to type out at a different time. Right now I must tell you about the birds....

Our lettuce was beautiful. The spinach growing by leaps and bounds. The peas were climbing each other and almost a foot tall. The swiss chard was glowing in yellows and reds. And then it happened--large chunks of leaves being eaten! Not MY plants! I planted those veggies for ME to eat! We couldn't figure out what was going on. I googled. I researched in all of my vegetable gardening books. You know what I found out? Nothing. Not a single site saying anything about pests for the aforementioned plants. In fact, everything I read basically said "If you can't grow these, you should stop gardening!" Didn't help the dying plants. Didn't help my curiosity.

It didn't look like bug bites--there were no holes at all. I thought that it had to be birds. My neighbor (a gardener of 25+ years) said that she has never heard of birds eating lettuce. Jeremy thought I was crazy. Tonight I got my answer. Jeremy went outside to make a fence around the raspberry bushes (again, another posting!) and found EIGHT chickadees eating my pea plants! It feels good to be right! Now I just have to figure out how to get the chickadees to eat the bugs that are in the garden rather than eating the garden!!