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Curated News

10 Berries That Birds Love | Treehugger | Tom Oder

"Have you ever thought about birdscaping your garden?

Birdscaping in this case doesn’t mean putting out a lot of feeders with different types of seed. It means planting the types of plants that will attract birds to your garden.

A good way to get started is by planting berry-producing plants — and now is the perfect time of year to do that.

Here are 10 easy-to-grow berry-producing shrubs, vines and trees that produce berries that birds will love. Most of these plants should grow well throughout the United States, according to Bill Thompson III of Bird Watcher's Digest in Marietta, Ohio.

As a bonus to help you get started with birdscaping, we’ve also included two popular fruit trees that birds love."

Nasturtiums are such wonderful plants, aren't they?

August is a time when your nasturtiums look fabulous, even after a summer of blooming their hearts out. Right about now, your nasturtiums will bloom better if you remove a few of the center leaves. Opening up the plant a little bit will promote airflow - and allow the sun to shine on the base of the plant.

Nasturtiums are 100% edible.

You can add the petals to any salad - just as you would watercress.

In fact, you can make a beautiful sandwich with nasturtium flowers and a little salad dressing.

Jane Eddington shared this idea in the Daily News out of New York in 1928.

She wrote,

“If you have never tried a nasturtium leaf spread with a thin mayonnaise between two thin slices of bread and butter, you do not know how pleasant a little bite – in two senses – you can get from this Indian-Cress filling."

And before I forget, I found a wonderful article on nasturtiums that was featured in the Hartford Current, out of Hartford, Connecticut, in August 1914.

It featured a variety of wonderful recipes for nasturtiums.

It not only gave some good advice about nasturtium capers and nasturtium sandwiches, but also a nasturtium sauce for fish, meat, and vegetables, a nasturtium vinegar, and a nasturtium potato salad. I'll have all of that in today's show notes -if you're geeking out on nasturtiums.

And, here is a little insight into how nasturtiums like to coexist with us: the more we cut nasturtiums - to bring in as cut flowers, or to eat them raw, or as capers - the more they are they will bloom. Regular cuttings seem to encourage more lateral development, and therefore, you get more flowers.

Win-win.

If you protect your plants with burlap or sheets on cold fall evenings, your nasturtiums might surprise you and bloom well into November.

Botanical History On This Day

1750 Peter Kalm at Niagara Falls, the Linnaean pupil whose visit likely yielded Kalm’s Lobelia and Kalm’s St. John’s Wort—plants later named in his honor.

1805 Meriwether Lewis discovers the Snowberry, noting berries “as white as wax”; the lovely but tasteless Symphoricarpos albus soon charmed Bernard McMahon and Thomas Jefferson.

1815 Eduard August von Regel, Swiss-born Russian botanist, garden director, and founder of Garten-Flora, reorganized St. Petersburg’s collections by geography and advanced horticultural journals.

1823 Benedict Roezl, the legendary one-handed orchid hunter who sent hundreds of species to Europe and braved jungles, jaguars, and thieves across the Americas.

1870 John Gould Veitch, Veitch Nurseries plant hunter of Japan and Australia, died at 31—remembered for seed-collecting so fine it felt like gathering “dust.”

1872 Richard Willstätter, Nobel chemist of chlorophyll who later designed lifesaving gas-mask filters, a botanically minded scientist of rare principle.

Unearthed Words

August, with sawdust sighs and goldenrod rebellions. “August” by Maggie Grant

Grow That Garden Library™

Read The Daily Gardener review of Not Your Mama’s Canning Book by Rebecca Lindamood

Buy the book on Amazon: Not Your Mama’s Canning Book

Today's Botanic Spark

1892 Albert Ruth’s “Partridge Berry” proved to be Linnaeus’s beloved twinflower—Linnaea borealis—a Smokies mystery specimen later spotted by A. J. Sharp after a herbarium fire.

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And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.