An Edible Birdhouse

**WARNING:  The following post may have graphic displays of cuteness.**

While visiting my in-laws and other relatives this holiday, we got to see an adorable edible birdhouse that my mother-in-law got for Christmas.

It is both cute and functional - after the birds eat all of the birdseed off of it, it can be used as an actual birdhouse.

According to my mother-in-law, a lot of birds had come and picked off many of their favorite seeds.  But by the time we got there, we found that a little squatter had decided to claim it for his own.

(Hey, you were warned..)

What a great little house to take shelter in during a light snow!

And you don't even have to leave the house to get a good meal...

...though you might have to streeetch a little...

Okay, you might have to get out of the house for the really good stuff.

 

Back off, this is my house now!

The aftermath:

Well, the critters definitely enjoyed it!

Something like this would look so cute in the Red House Garden, don't you think?

Next post:  making an edible birdhouse...

Say It Isn't So!

Now that I'm finally home after the holidays, I checked out the garden to see how it was doing.  Were there any blooms in January for this month's Garden Blogger's Bloom Day?

Clematis 'Bill Mackenzie'

There were!  My 'Bill Mackenzie' clematis is trying to make up for the fact that it hasn't really bloomed in two years by sporadically blooming throughout the winter.  Apparently plants do respond to threats...

The rest of the garden was pretty brown like expected except.. 

Uh, oh, what was this?!

Oh, no!  That can't be a crocus, can it?!  Say it isn't so!

So.. hello, my name is Crocus 'Ard Schenk'!

There are crocus in my garden?!  But that would mean Spring is almost here and.. uh, oh, I am so not ready for Spring because... well, people, I have a confession to make.

I still haven't even planted all my fall bulbs.

 

So, uh, here's to hoping that my plants are just really, really confused by all the warm weather we've been having, and hopefully we'll have just a little bit more winter...

And I'm, uh, going to go outside in the yard for awhile...

Houseplants on Beds of Moss

For the New Year we were up in the Northeast, visiting relatives of Mr. Red House.  My mother-in-law is a gardener and has a beautiful collection of houseplants.  I love seeing them, especially since I don't currently have any houseplants, mainly due to a cat who can't resist munching on anything even remotely green.  (You should see the begging that goes on in my house whenever I eat a salad.)

I love my mother-in-law's exquisite collection of containers.  She keeps an extensive container garden outside during the summer months, but then brings many of them in for the winter.  Looking a little closer, the plants are made even more beautiful by her overwintering habit of covering the soil with soft pieces of woodland moss.

She does this as a mulch to keep moisture in and prevent the plants from drying out too quickly. 

(Thus one would not want to do this with succulents and other arid plants.)

The moss even kept enough moisture in for some seedlings to grow, such as these impatiens that grew up out of the moss.

I just love the beds of moss because they look beautiful.

Even a dead plant looks pretty good when it's nestled in moss in a beautiful container!

Honestly, just a container of moss looks good. 

Cup o' Moss

Can you tell I love moss?  If I ever get a houseplant again, I'll have to plant a bed of moss at the base.

Do you think my plant-munching cat would try to get into a terrarium?

Callaway Gardens - Butterfly House

While in Georgia for the Christmas holiday, we had the fortune of visiting Callaway Gardens.  After seeing some of Callaway Gardens' amazing birds of prey, we had just enough time to see a few butterflies before getting supper and driving through their spectacular Fantasy in Lights show. 

The Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center is large, glass-enclosed, conservatory filled with tropical flowers and even a small waterfall.  Hundreds of tropical butterflies representing 50 species fly freely around the conservatory.

tropical flowers inside the Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center

I do not know a lot about tropical butterflies and am therefore am not good at identifying them.  Thus I was quite stunned when, at the sight of the very first butterfly we came upon, my four-year-old calmly stated, "Oh look!  There's a Blue Morpho butterfly."

Blue Morpho butterfly at a banana cage at Callaway Gardens

Well, at least she's learning something useful from those TV shows!
Go, Diego!  

Later on, we saw a Blue Morpho with the beautiful wings opened.

Blue Mopho butterfly at Callaway Gardens

There were also many butterflies from the Heliconiinae family, which are often called longwings.

Tiger Longwing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Some of the most stunning butterflies from this category are the Cethosiea, or lacewing, butterflies.

Lacewing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Once up close, one can easily see why they are called 'lacewings'.

Lacewing butterfly at Callaway Gardens

Several of the butterflies looked like it had been a long day and they were ready to leave...

Clipper butterfly at Callaway Gardens

While other, most likely younger butterflies nectared on the plentiful flowers, and many more flitted about the conservatory.

I think this is a Great Eggfly butterfly, nectaring on pentas.

Besides the butterflies, the tropical conservatory itself was a treat, full of beautiful and even unusual look flowers.

I think I need some pink crocosmia for my garden now...

Outside of the butterfly room are all the chrysalises of the different butterflies behind glass with what looked to be a tunnel for newly emerged butterflies to fly into the butterfly conservatory.  Pupa are shipped to the butterfly center from Malaysia, the Philippines, and Central and South America.

Butterfly chrysalises at Callaway Gardens

I had such a great time at Callaway Gardens seeing the Birds of Prey show and visiting the Butterfly Center; however, my kids' favorite part of the day was the holiday light show.  Five miles of music combined with millions of Christmas lights - well, I guess it's hard to compete with that!

linking with the Little Red House blog for Mosaic Monday

Callaway Gardens - Birds of Prey

In Georgia for the Christmas season, we were delighted to visit the famous Callaway Gardens.  Callaway Gardens is best known for their enormous display of over 20,000 beautiful azaleas.  Some spring I would love to see them all in bloom!  In winter, however, the main attraction of Callaway Gardens is their holiday light show, Fantasy in Lights, a five mile stretch of various holiday scenes made up of over 8 million lights and accompanied by music. 

My two and four year old girls were very excited when they found out we were going to a light show.  We arrived a few hours before nightfall so that we could see what else the gardens offered before driving through the lights.  I wanted to see what winter gardens they had - most likely located in the John A. Sibley Horticultural Center - but for some reason looking at plants was low on my kids' list of things to do.

Aha, some winter flowers at the famous Callaway Gardens!

I managed to see at least a few flowering bushes - flowering quince, I believe - on the way to the first event of the afternoon, the Birds of Prey show.  Callaway Gardens has about a dozen different birds that rotate in their shows, and during our show, four beautiful birds were displayed.

Cedar, a Great Horned Owl, sits on the glove of a trainer at Callaway Gardens

Each bird was allowed to fly around the small amphitheater while the trainer expounded on its traits.

Great Horned Owl in flight

A few months ago, a man came to the place where my mom worked to ask if he could use the roof of the tall building to capture a hawk for a Bird of Prey show.  Thankfully, they told him no.  Capturing a wild raptor is not only sad, but also usually illegal.  The birds at Callaway Gardens are all birds that have been rehabilitated after getting hurt or are in some way unable to survive in the wild due to well-meaning people finding them and 'rescuing' them. 

This Red-tailed Hawk is blind in one eye.

We often see hawks like this Red-tailed Hawk flying around our area in North Carolina on a clear day, looking for prey.  This might be why I see many more birds at my bird feeder on cloudy days..

The red tail feathers for which the Red-tailed Hawk is named.

It was fascinating to learn that not only do hawks see much better than humans do, they also see faster.  To us, the wings of a flying hummingbird are just a blur, but a hawk can see and register each wing beat.  All the better to hunt with, my dear..

Guinevere, a Red-tailed Hawk at Callaway Gardens
After being named, Guinevere was found to actually be a male bird.

Most hawks are solitary hunters.  However, at the Birds of Prey show we had the fortune of seeing a Harris's Hawk, a type of hawk that hunts in packs.

Rohmann, a Harris's Hawk at Callaway Gardens

Harris's Hawks, native in the Southwest, are fairly social birds and often live and hunt in family groups.  Because of this cooperative hunting, they can take down larger animals such as jackrabbits.

Harris's Hawk

The last bird to be shown was a surprisingly handsome Black Vulture.

Vinnie the Vulture, a Black Vulture at Callaway Gardens

Vultures and other scavengers actually play a very important and much-needed role in the ecosystem.  They keep the environment free of carcasses as well as limit the spread of many diseases.  The stomach acid of vultures is impressively corrosive and can kill germs such as botulism, anthrax, and even HIV, according to the bird's handler.

Vultures get a bad rap, but they are actually play a very important part in the ecosystem.

So it would seem that nothing could kill a vulture, right?  

Sadly, several types of vultures in southeast Asia have become nearly EXTINCT in just the past 10 - 15 years due to a drug called Diclofenac, which is used as a common pain-killer and anti-inflammatory for humans and animals.  It is often used in cattle to reduce joint pain in order to keep them able to work for longer - however, it causes acute kidney failure of the vultures who eat the carcasses.  

Thankfully, the Indian government has finally recently banned the drug for animals, and Nepal and Pakistan are following suit.  Unfortunately, it will be some years before the vulture population totally recovers.

Black Vulture in flight

For more great information about some different birds in the Birds of Prey show, as well as to see what Callaway Gardens is like in the spring, check out Southern Meadows, a great Georgian gardening blog site.

Next blog post... Callaway Gardens' tropical butterfly house!

Red Clay Dirt

We spent a nice Christmas at my parent's house in Georgia this year.  This is actually the same house where I spent most of my high school years, an astonishing fact to me, since we usually moved every three or four years on average growing up.  My parents were originally military, and we saw a lot of the country.

It was here in Georgia where I first met my biggest gardening nemesis - the problematic Red Clay dirt.

Part of the yard with the infamous Georgia red clay that is so prominent in the region.

I remember the first time I saw Red Clay dirt.  I had moved to Georgia partway through my freshman year of high school, and we were staying with some family friends the first day while my parents were getting our house set up.  I remember going out into their clear-cut back yard.  It had rained the previous day, and the yard was a giant field of Unbelievably Red mud.  I don't think I had even heard of Red dirt before and was quite taken aback.

The red color of the clay is due to iron oxides.

That was not the only color surprise of the day, I remember.  The previous tenants of the house my parents bought had been rumored to be drug dealers, and it was still decorated in what was no doubt the latest drug dealer style - every single wall had been painted Baby Pink, the carpets were an Indescribable Green, and the vertical window blinds were Shiny Metallic Gold.  For our first supper in that house we had Yellow potato bread, which I had never had before.  Red dirt, pink walls, green carpet, gold shades, and yellow bread - I felt like I had gone down a very strange sort of rabbit hole.

Even the leaves in this puddle are covered with red clay.

Now, a couple decades later, the house has been redone in much more tasteful colors, and I do like yellow potato bread.  However, I haven't quite reconciled with the dense, clumpy, terrible-draining Red Clay dirt, which runs in veins through my North Carolina yard.

Most plants cannot survive such badly-draining soil.

The problem is that in order to garden most effectively with Red Clay dirt, one must first gently cultivate it with a pickaxe tiller backhoe, mix lots of compost and good Brown or Black dirt into it, and then pray that you've pickaxed tilled excavated a large enough area so that you haven't created a swimming pool for your plants.  A lot of people with clay give up and just garden in raised beds.

Having red clay soil can also lead to problems with erosion.  In this spot, the soil around the base of the tree has been washed away over time, exposing some interesting roots.

My mom, who likes to garden but has little time between working and her passion of quilting, has chosen a less confrontational approach to her Red Clay and plants mainly no-fuss native plants that can withstand the clay better.  Native dogwoods reside under the giant preexisting Sweetgum trees, and plantings of azaleas, hydrangeas, coreopsis, and daffodils prevail.

Thankfully there are a few plants that do well in clay, like many hollies.

Thankfully I don't have quite as much of the contemptible Red Clay as my mother's garden does.  Nevertheless, I have to do a lot of soil amending to grow the plants that I want. Even my 2 year old now eagerly points out the bags of nice Black dirt and compost for me every time we go to the plant store. (Good child!)  And when I garden, my trusty pickaxe is never far from hand.

Mr. Red House bought me a new tool to help dig through the clay, which I am excited to try out!