With the return of warm weather, new plant growth, and emerging insects, you may have noticed the return of bird song, too. Migratory birds begin to return to their breeding grounds in May from locations as far south as Central and South America. Some species will stay in Maryland all summer to nest; others are passing through on their way to breeding grounds farther north. Maryland is under the Atlantic migration flyway, so we have quite a lot of migrating birds in our community, including orioles, warblers, swallows, and more!
Map by American Bird Conservancy
With bird diversity at its peak in our region due to the return of summer species and the temporary presence of northern species on their way home, it’s a great time to go birding! While the Maryland Ornithological Society’s annual May Count has already passed, you can check out their calendar for smaller birding events across the state, including meetings, tours, and educational opportunities.
You can also see which birds are coming and going through the BirdCast Migration Dashboard —enter your county to see how many birds flew over the previous night and cumulatively this season, as well as a list of species to expect this time of year. The Audubon Society hosts an interactive migration map where you can select a location and a bird species to watch where birds travel throughout the year, thanks to data collected from individually-tagged birds.
In addition to tracking their progress and contributing to community science efforts, there are steps you can take to help migratory birds on their journeys:
Keep cats indoors or supervise outdoor excursions, as free-roaming outdoor cats frequently prey on birds.
Reduce artificial light at night, as birds often fly at night to avoid predators, stay cool, and navigate by the stars and moon. Artificial light from the ground attracts and disorients migratory birds, disrupting their flight paths and increasing collisions with buildings. Minimize light pollution around your home by turning off outside lights, using red bulbs or red gel filters, and/or adding shades to direct light downward instead of up at the sky. You can also put path or porch lights on timers or install motion sensors, so lights are only on when you need them. Close your curtains or blinds at dusk to protect birds from indoor lights.
Lastly, an action where gardeners can excel: plant native vegetation to provide fruits and support insects for native birds with varied diets. For example, our Maryland State bird, the beloved Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula), which spends the winter in Central America, feeds mostly on insects like caterpillars, beetles, and grasshoppers, but also eats berries and nectar. A native plant like serviceberry (any species in the genus Amelanchier) would be an excellent choice; it can host 124 species of caterpillars and produces fruits that look similar to blueberries, another oriole favorite (any species in the genus Vaccinium). Native birches (like the sweet birch, Betula lenta), plums (like the American plum, Prunus americana), and oaks (like white oak, Quercus alba) also support higher caterpillar abundances, and red mulberry (Morus rubra) and native blackberry species (like the Allegheny blackberry, Rubus allegheniensis) grow attractive fruits.
With these actions, you can help protect our beautiful springtime singers!
Baltimore oriole by Andrew Weitzel
Serviceberry by Native Foods Nursery; blueberry by 88 Acres; red mulberry by K. Dave; blackberry by Ragesoss
By Sarah Rothman, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science and Technology at the University of Maryland. Read more by Sarah.
I’ve been thinking a lot about habits lately—a whole lot. Changes in just one or two simple habits can radically transform our personal lives, society, and how we relate to the natural world, hopefully for the better but sometimes for the worse. How many of us have made a resolution or started a new habit already this year involving nature, gardening, or land stewardship? Are you sticking with it or just getting around to thinking about starting it? I am here to say: “If it matters, don’t give up!” It can take time and practice through repetition to establish or change a habit, according to an accumulating body of fascinating research around the human psychology of habits. A little bit of knowledge about how habits work can go a long way toward establishing and maintaining new habits.
The habit loop
Habits are a big part of what powers us through the day without having to think through the details of each and every step in a routine action. From wake up routines to commuting patterns, we carry out a series of regular actions based on established and regularly repeated cues, routines, and rewards. This is known as the “habit loop,” as vividly described by Charles Duhigg in his best-selling book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business.
Duhigg describes how habits, deeply encoded in one of the most evolutionarily ancient parts of our brains, the basal ganglia, relieve us of some of our daily cognitive load so that the more advanced parts of our brain can be devoted to higher order activities like reasoning, innovation, and decision-making. Habits can become ingrained fairly quickly if the chemical neurotransmitter reward in our brains is great enough, if the cues and rewards are strongly linked, or when routines are simplified and reinforced through regular repetition and behavior reinforcement.
Caption: An example of the habit loop illustrating part of my winter bluebird care routine. I spot a messy bird bath after a day of heavy use (visual cue), spring into action to scrub the basin and refill with clean water (routine), then enjoy the thrill of spotting a bluebird taking a drink of fresh, clean water the next morning (reward). My craving to see bluebirds in winter helps to power me through this frequent winter routine on freezing cold days. I suspect some endorphins are released in my brain every time I witness the scene of a bluebird drinking fresh water outside my window on a freezing cold winter day. Graphic: S. Small-Lorenz
Cue-routine-reward. Cue-routine-reward. A habit cycle powered by an incessant craving for a drop of neurotransmitter joy. Habits can become so routinely mechanized that they are difficult, yet not impossible, to change. It is entirely possible, though, to modify habits just through tweaking routines. It is also possible to create new habits through repetition, with clearly identified cues and rewards. To instill a new habit, it can help to establish the cue, the reward, and a simple sequence of action steps in between.
Caption: We lose the valuable benefits of leaf litter when we bag it and send it off site. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
It occurs to me that the way we typically manage residential landscapes in Maryland is driven largely by culturally reinforced habits that may not always represent the best possible stewardship of our surrounding ecosystems. Feed the lawn with bags of manufactured fertilizer. Water that lawn with a hose tapped into municipal or well water. Mow the lawn with a roaring gas-powered machine. Rake or blow the leaves to the curb, prune and trim, then bag it all up and send it off in trucks to be dealt with off-site. There are exceptions, but as I travel through suburban Maryland, this is what I often see, all in support of a preferred aesthetic of an emerald green carpet lawn dotted with a few ornamental trees or shrubs offering low habitat value, with a high cost to our watershed, ecosystems, and climate. A whole series of lifelong, deeply ingrained lawn care habits multiplied across acres and miles depleted of beneficial insects, butterflies, and birds.
These habits also reflect missed opportunities to create better soil with higher soil organic matter that absorbs more stormwater where it falls, which would result in a more flood and drought-resilient watershed because soil with higher organic matter absorbs and retains more moisture. This, in turn, creates a foundation for a flourishing landscape that supports a wide array of biodiversity.
Keystone habits: Small actions that lead to big results
Then there are habits known as “keystone habits.” Like the architectural feature that supports an arch or keystone species that sustain an ecosystem, keystone habits are those habits that have the power to make big change throughout a system, by means of small actions. Small action = big change. It sounds so simple and gratifying, right? But is it realistic?
Duhigg gives examples of successful organizations and individuals who have identified and implemented keystone habits to achieve positive change and desired outcomes. These include daily habits drilled by Michael Phelps that helped him to break a world swimming record in an Olympic race, even while his goggles failed him, and former Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill’s singular, unprecedented obsession with workplace safety that dramatically transformed its corporate culture and overall productivity, despite initial deep doubts and laments of indignant shareholders. Think about a life-altering habit that you have adopted, changed, or left behind. How hard was it but how much did it transform your life to eventually change that habit? Research has shown that cues and rewards of the habit loop can be difficult to rewire, but that it is also entirely possible to alter the routine between the cue and reward to achieve a more desired outcome.
My primary driving question these days is: “How do we change habits to improve habitat?”
As I review the many sustainable practices promoted through our Bay-Wise Living Landscapes Program, I am searching for those potential keystone habits that we should emphasize in 2025 that represent small actions for big changes. Small behavior changes across the landscape that, when added up, could have an outsized, beneficial impact on our watersheds and their ecosystems.
My 2025 keystone habit for Maryland
If I could foster one keystone habit change across Maryland in 2025 it would be this: “Recycle yard debris on-site.” This one habit actually captures a number of low-cost but beneficial practices, such as leaving leaf litter where it falls, leaf mulching, grass-cycling, and creating wildlife brush-piles from yard prunings. So, technically, we’re talking about habits within a habit.
Caption: Leaf litter (L) and a log under a layer of snow (R). Firefly larvae take shelter in leaf litter and logs throughout the winter. Yard “debris” has high habitat value, providing overwintering habitat for many beneficial insects and wildlife species. Photos: S. Small-Lorenz.
Managing our yard “debris” like leaves, grass, clippings, branches, stumps, snags, and prunings in ways that acknowledge their ecological value can improve soil and water, laying the groundwork for more climate-resilient landscapes and communities. Leaving leaves where they fall nourishes soil and vegetation, retains soil moisture, creates a substrate for native plants to establish, and provides an insulating ground layer of habitat for a wide array of species.
Leaf mulching and composting on-site are other sustainable options for managing leaf litter. Grass-cycling by leaving grass clippings on the lawn instead of bagging it up and sending it off-site provides a free, natural fertilizer with a much lower carbon footprint than trucking it off or applying manufactured fertilizer. Arranging downed limbs and pruned branches into brush piles provides shelter for songbirds and small mammals on extended snowy days like we’ve had this month and throughout the year and returns carbon and nutrients to the soil. (The main exception to this habit is to remove and properly dispose of invasive non-native plant materials, especially those that reproduce vegetatively or have gone to seed, to avoid spreading them.)
Caption: Brush pile in deep snow, surrounded by animal tracks. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
How does habit change take root in the community?
However, pleading with people or even providing scientific evidence is not likely to make these habit changes take hold on a large enough scale to make a measurable impact across an entire watershed. Study upon study has shown that people are more likely to respond to a combination of seeing their neighbors do it and financial incentives over any amount of urging, pleading, pledging, or piles of scientific evidence (Bergquist et al. 2023). Could this be because neighbor cues and financial rewards better tap into this primal habit loop of cue-routine-reward? There is evidence that the answer to this question is “yes.”
Friction, cues, and incentives
In a fascinating review, Mazar et al. (2021) identified three successful strategies for motivating environmental behavior change through policy, and I believe these strategies are applicable to individuals and organizations as well. First is the strategic use of friction. Identify where friction can be reduced or increased to motivate habit change. Make it easy to implement the desired behavior (reduce friction) or a little more challenging to do it the old way (add friction). They cite a number of environmental behavior change studies, including one that made it easier to recycle by reducing steps to the recycling bin or a little more expensive to use disposable bags through token bag fees. This is a matter of simplifying the routine in the cue-routine-reward habit loop to lead to the desired behavior or complicating it to deter less desired behavior.
Caption: A blue male Eastern Bluebird points his bill upwards as he drinks water from a bird bath during a snowfall. An adjacent inkberry provides winter cover for birds. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz.
Eastern Bluebirds are fussy and require water to drink alongside their breakfast of shelled sunflower seeds and mealworms, which requires maintaining a clean, heated bird bath throughout the winter. In my own practice of wintering bluebird care, I had to find a way to reduce “friction” to make it easier to regularly scrub our heated bird bath during a busy winter work week, especially when it gets dark before I come home from work, and we have shut off outdoor taps to avoid freezing and burst pipes. We finally installed a simple adhesive hook under the sink so that I could easily find my special scrubber, and I now keep the watering can near the front door for easy refills. I found that I could vastly reduce the hassle of refilling and scrubbing the birdbath simply by making it easy to reach for my tools, speeding up the process and frequency of scrubbing the bird bath and heater. I simplified the routine so that the visual cue – a messy birdbath – more easily resulted in the reward – waking up to my bluebirds and their flock mates drinking clear fresh water right outside my front window.
“Re-setting the default” is a related strategy. A variety of studies have shown that setting the desired behavior as the default results in more rapid and widespread adoption of the more environmentally friendly option. For example, placing vegetarian meals at the top of a menu or adjusting office thermostat default settings resulted in significantly higher uptake of the desired pro-environment behaviors. In a different but related example, if I see salad at the start of a buffet meal, I will undoubtedly fill my plate with a bed of greens. If I encounter the dessert table first, you’d better believe I’m starting with the cheesecake!
Second is implementing clear cues to action – for example, studies showed that improving signage on cafeteria recycling bins using clear visual symbols right at the disposal site resulted in positive environmental behavior changes. I see this as directly tapping into the cue part of the cue-routine-reward habit loop.
Third is psychologically informed incentives that steer people toward desired environmental habits or away from detrimental habits. It turns out that people really like and value free things. Small fees, like the bag fee, have resulted in major societal behavior shifts by imposing a very small cost on the behavior of accepting a disposable bag. My local natural foods store takes it a step further by offering a wooden nickel token for each reusable bag a customer deploys, to donate to their choice of three local charities. There’s a double reward to accelerate that cue-routine-reward habit loop. Save the bag fee and donate it on the spot to a charity making a positive impact in the community.
Savor the intangible rewards
Rewards don’t always have to be financial, although small financial rewards or rebates have been shown to motivate environmental behavior change on a societal level. Rewards may come in the form of cost and time-savings or they may be as intangible as the smell of rich organic soil that you and your tree co-created, the endorphins released during the exercise of planting a common witch hazel shrub, the pleasure of seeing an Eastern Bluebird take a drink of fresh water from your clean, heated bird bath on a freezing winter day, or the joy of sighting that first firefly flicker of June.
Captions: Top: leaf litter, prunings, and standing woodland sunflower stems in the winter during a January snowfall event. Bottom: litter and songbird tracks in a light layer of snow. Photos: S. Small-Lorenz
If we can get comfortable with a slightly rougher and wilder aesthetic in our residential landscapes, the biodiversity and climate-resilience benefits could be immense. These new habits lend themselves to creativity – you can be as messy, manicured, or artistic as you would like with them yet still enjoy the benefits of rich soil, sustained soil moisture, pollinators, songbirds, hawks, and owls in your yard or park.
If you have resolved to become a better steward of nature this year, or even if you are just now thinking about trying your hand at some aspect of ecological landscaping, try putting your new knowledge of the habit loop to the test. If you’re looking for a place to start, join me in recycling your yard waste on-site in 2025. It may take a while to adjust and get the hang of this way of doing things, but once you get in the habit loop by identifying your cues, routines, and rewards, I predict that the workload becomes lighter, the cost savings will add up, and the many intangible rewards of being a better watershed steward right where you live will be noticeable and energizing.
References
Berguist, M. M. Thiel, M.H. Goldberg, S. van der Linden. 2023. Field interventions for climate change mitigation behaviors: A second-order meta-analysis. PNAS 120(13).
Duhigg, C. 2023. The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Penguin Random House. New York.
Mazar, A., G. Tomaino, Z. Carmon, W. Wood. 2021. Habits to save our habitat: Using the psychology of habits to promote sustainability. Behavioral Science & Policy, 7(2). Pp. 75-89.
By Stacy Small-Lorenz, Ph.D., Residential Landscape Ecology Specialist, University of Maryland Extension. Read more posts by Stacy.
It’s that most glorious time of year in Maryland, peak autumn, a time of constant change where every day brings new explosions of color. Beyond leaf peeping along our morning commutes, changes large and small are detectable in exquisite detail, if we only pause to step out in nature to look, listen, and smell the fragrance of the season in the air.
Right now, migratory birds are coming and going, shrubs are blooming and berrying, bees of all stripes are scrambling for the last drops of nectar as fall flowers fade. With some surprisingly low-cost, low-maintenance strategies, you can begin right away to transform your local landscape into a brilliant fall banquet for birds, bees, and butterflies.
Pollinators continue to gather nectar from late fall flowers. Photos: S. Small-Lorenz
At this time of year, wintering birds are beginning to arrive from the north, while some summer visitors linger to enjoy the bounty of fall. Dark-eyed Juncos (Junco hyemalis) are already returning from their northern breeding grounds. I spotted my first juncos of the season flitting about the raised garden beds on Halloween right outside of the Anne Arundel County Extension office.
Cabbage White (Pieris rapae) butterflies were introduced to North America and are common across Maryland. Their larvae are considered to be crop pests. They typically reach the end of their adult life cycles toward late October. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
On the same day, Cabbage White butterflies were still mobbing blooming New York asters in the brilliant noon sunlight on a day of record-breaking late October heat. The viburnum berries had already been plucked, possibly by the Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) singing nearby, and its outermost foliage had turned a deep Cabernet red on a chillier night. I suspect that mockingbird has now staked out the American holly berries ripening nearby, as he seeks to maximize his energy intake before winter sets in.
At Howard County Conservancy the day before, I noticed winterberry shrubs loaded with ripening berries, where another singing mockingbird steadfastly stood guard. Native honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is flowering and berrying simultaneously, gracing the trellis archway into the native plant garden, and the common witch-hazel (Hamamelisvirginiana) is blooming, our only witch-hazel to bloom in the fall.
Ripening American Holly (Ilex opaca) Berries. Photo: S. Small-LorenzNative Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens). Photo: S. Small-LorenzWinterberry Holly (Ilex verticillata). Photo: S. Small-LorenzFall-blooming, native Common Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
Taking cues like this from nature can be an excellent strategy for planning our conservation landscaping for year-round color. Planting native berrying shrubs and evergreens not only extends our color palette, it provides natural sources of food and shelter for songbirds like Gray Catbirds (Dumetella carolinensis), Northern Mockingbirds, Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum), Eastern Bluebirds (Sialia sialis), Yellow-rumped Warblers (Setophaga coronata), Ruby-crowned Kinglets (Corthylio calendula), and thrushes as temperatures cool and extra energy is required to fuel up before, during and after migration.
Leaving fall seed heads standing into winter also provides resources for a whole array of seed-eating birds like sparrows and finches. Even as flowers begin to wilt and fade, they still provide essential nectar resources to native insects that are beneficial for their pollination and pest control services, not to mention as songbird prey.
So if you are considering what you can do right now for nature and the environment in your own neighborhood, here are a few low- to no-cost fall strategies to get you started right away:
Map out one or more locations that you would like to dedicate to a native shrub planting area. Make note of conditions (wet/dry, sunny/shady, soil type) so that you can select the right plants for your site when the time comes. It isn’t too late to plant native shrubs in most parts of Maryland, but if you choose to wait for spring, you can still start preparing the bed and browsing for fall-berrying shrubs now (see #5)! If you don’t know your soil type, this is the perfect time to do some home soil analysis. Observe where stormwater flows off of your property, and consider planting a mulched stormwater buffer using arborist wood chips and native plants to absorb rainwater which can both help reduce downstream flooding and improve water quality while beautifying your landscape.
Pledge to leave the leaves this fall. Raking a thick layer of leaves into your designated shrub planting bed will almost immediately start to create habitat, retain soil moisture, and build rich living soils. I call this “Raking by Design.” Think about this – who rakes the leaves in the forest? Towhees, sparrows, jays, bats, squirrels, deer, and many more wild residents…a reminder that leaf “litter” is an important habitat component for many creatures, and it puts essential nutrients back into the soil as the leaves decompose. If you’re concerned about leaves blowing around, it’s fairly easy to contain whole leaves with low garden border fencing, but it isn’t entirely necessary. Consider designating a portion of your yard a ‘no-rake’ wild zone, where you leave the leaves undisturbed, right where they fall.
Leave the leaves for healthy soil and habitat. Photo: S. Small-Lorenz
Leave your native flowers standing well into winter, beyond peak bloom. Birds, bees, and butterflies will benefit from the stems and seed heads well into fall and early winter.
Use fall prunings, cuttings, logs or stumps to create shelter for overwintering birds, bees, and other wildlife. Recycling your “yard waste” is one of the easiest, low cost ways to start building healthy soil and creating habitat to benefit biodiversity in your local landscape. This can take the form of a brush pile, wood pile (situated well away from your home’s foundation), leaving a natural stump instead of stump-grinding, or building a simple “bug snug” like the one pictured here.
A “bug snug” made with cut woody stems, seed heads, and leaves will provide a shelter for overwintering insects, stem-nesting bees, and birds. Photo: C. Carignan
Browse options for native berrying shrubs to plant this fall or next spring that would be right for the conditions in your yard. While browsing native plant resources like Alliance for Chesapeake Bay’s Native Plant Center, also make note of whether the shrubs you choose are dioecious or not, meaning that you may need to consider planting female and male plants near one another in order for flowers to be fertilized and berries to form. Finding native plants locally right when you want them can be a bit challenging when getting started, so take some time to familiarize yourself with Maryland native plant material sources via Maryland Native Plant Society’s native plant shopping resources.
Which of these low-cost, low-maintenance strategies are you planning to try to enhance your fall living landscape? Which berrying shrubs might you consider adding to your fall banquet? Leave us a comment below, and don’t forget to let us know which wild visitors are enjoying the fall feast in your neighborhood!
By Stacy Small-Lorenz, Agent, Residential Landscape Ecology, University of Maryland Extension.Read more posts by Stacy.
Cedar Waxwing dining on a Green Hawthorn berry. Photo: Miri Talabac
Q: This summer’s mysterious bird illness has me thinking…I’ve become more interested in birds during the past two years and would like to attract them to my yard with plants. Are there favored recommendations?
A: Bird-attracting landscaping definitely beats out bird feeders as the preferable way to bring these beauties into yards for easier viewing as a safer environment than a communal feeder. (While you’re at it, look into ways to discourage window strikes since plants, like feeders, could increase encounters with glass.)
Plant recommendations are going to be incredibly varied because the diet of birds is so varied, both across species and throughout the year. Site conditions in your garden will narrow down what may be an overwhelming list of choices. Here are some general tips:
When looking at berry or seed production, consider productivity for each season.
Try to focus on native plants only, since birds will deposit their seeds beyond your landscape.
To pick a timely category – late-ripening berries – there are some notably popular species. Highly-ranked contenders for both resident and southbound migrant birds include Viburnums, Dogwoods (trees and shrubs), Spicebush, Virginia Creeper, Eastern Redcedar, Magnolia, Black Tupelo, Hackberry, Sassafras, Bayberry, Sumac, Hollies, and Hawthorn.
Cornell’s All About Birds web library plus local Audubon Societies are good resources for more thorough information on individual species diet, habitat preferences, and plant suggestions for both foraging and nesting.
By Miri Talabac, Horticulturist, University of Maryland Extension Home & Garden Information Center. Miri writes the Garden Q&A for The Baltimore Sun.
Have a plant or insect question? University of Maryland Extension has answers! Send your questions and photos to Ask Extension.
For me, at least, it’s been a bumper year for berries.
Black raspberries in my garden in mid-June
In some years, I harvest only sparsely from the various fruit plantings in my landscape. Black raspberries, in particular, get snatched by birds before I can get to them. Not this year. I had them all to myself until this week, and they’re now pretty much done anyway. My guess—and I haven’t seen any science to back this up, but it makes sense—is that the birds have been too busy scarfing down cicadas to bother with berries. Now that the cicadas are gone, they may turn their attention to my fruit-bearing bushes, but I’ve had a head start.
Periodical cicadas are not an unqualified blessing for fruit growers, of course. Female cicadas lay their eggs in branches of a certain diameter, which are abundant on a lot of fruiting plants. This can cause dieback at the ends of these branches. The affected branch tips will fall off naturally over time; you can prune them if they bother you, but remember that cicada eggs are inside slits in the branches, and won’t hatch until probably August. I’m just going to leave mine alone.
Below you can see dieback on blueberry and pawpaw plants caused by cicada laying.
I didn’t bother covering most of my fruit plants, but here in Germantown we didn’t have a huge number of cicadas, either, so the damage has been minimal and the plants will recover. Some growers used netting to keep the bugs out, which is of course really inconvenient if the plants fruit during the same period. I was startled a number of times while harvesting when I moved a branch and suddenly encountered staring red eyes. The cicadas found my blueberries early on, as you can see by this nymph exoskeleton still clinging to a berry that ripened underneath it.
But they are not competition for the fruit itself, and since the birds have been ignoring the berries for the most part, my freezer is full of blueberries, black raspberries, and blackcurrants. I’ve made blueberry chutney, blueberry syrup, and blueberry-lavender shrub (from this book). Shrubs are refreshing drinks made from fruit, sugar, and vinegar, ready in a week or less to be enjoyed mixed with sparkling water or in various alcoholic and nonalcoholic blends. I have plans for jam, cassis and other alcoholic infusions, baked goods, and more.
Fruit-bearing shrubs and trees fit into a home landscape very well. Raspberries and blueberries are great starter plants; I also recommend currants for a shadier spot, though you will not be eating them fresh off the plant, so add in some processing time in addition to harvesting time. (Also be sure that you buy varieties resistant to white pine blister rust, for which the currant family is a host.) Pawpaws are wonderful native trees that add dramatic flair to a landscape; you need at least two genetically-different trees for cross-pollination. They will take several years to start bearing, depending on the size of the trees you plant, and mature trees do sucker prolifically, so you will end up with a pawpaw grove that needs some maintenance to keep under control. But the fruit is not commonly available for sale commercially, and it has a great banana-mango flavor that’s unusual in our temperate climate. You can also try blackberries, gooseberries, and figs. All of these are easier to grow in our climate than tree fruits like apples, peaches, and pears, but if you like a challenge, those are possibilities as well. You can find advice on all sorts of fruit growing on the HGIC website.
I’m wondering how next year will go in my fruit-growing adventure. All these cicada-stuffed birds are laying more eggs and raising more youngsters this year, so the population will be higher in 2022, and there won’t be any periodical cicadas to fill their bellies. So I expect I’ll have to be more vigilant about protecting the plants I can protect in order to have much of a harvest. But I’ll probably still have some leftover blueberries in the freezer, and plenty of jars of jam and chutney. Every year is different in gardening, and 2021 will definitely stand out in my memory for noisy cicadas, happy birds, and plentiful berries.
By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.
Some people like to keep birds in cages. Kent Phillips, a Master Gardener in Howard County, likes to keep birds out of his cage.
Each June, Kent and two helpers assemble a 10’ high by 10’ wide by 60’ long cage around his blueberry patch so the Phillips family, not neighborhood birds, will feast on the 16 to 20 gallons of fruit that his nine high bush blueberry bushes produce from early June into early August.
The uprights of the cage consist of 10-foot lengths of ¾-inch PVC pipe. Each upright is strengthened by a 10’ piece of rebar. Cross-supports at the top link everything together with a system of PVC T’s and L’s. Some are glued permanently, while others aren’t, to facilitate assembling the cage in spring and taking it down in the fall. He pounds a 3-foot piece of one-inch iron pipe into the ground to make 12” to 18” holes into which he slips the PVC/rebar uprights. He then wraps the huge, rectangular PVC box in plastic bird netting.
“I started out 20 years ago with a wooden structure,” Kent explained, “but that was frustrating because the bird netting snagged on every splinter. After a couple of years, I switched to PVC pipe. I use plastic ties to attach the netting to the PVC pipes.”
Kent estimated it takes about 2 ½ hours to put up the structure. “But all the work is worth it,” he said. “I have six varieties of early, mid-season, and late blueberries that produce over 6 to 7 weeks. Harvest depends somewhat on the weather.”
Kent listed three important factors to keep in mind when raising blueberries—pH of the soil, water, and the every-hungry birds.
“The cage takes care of the birds, of course” he said. “My drip irrigation system takes about 3 hours a week to put down an inch of water, without which the berries would be stunted and production would fall. The Home and Garden Information Center has outlined a program using ferrous sulfate and elemental sulfur to keep the pH of the soil between 4.5 and 5.5, the range for maximum fruiting.
“We’ve been picking since early June,” Kent added. “This morning my grandson and my two daughters picked a couple of gallons and cleaned me out.”
What does his family do with up to 20 gallons of blueberries?
“We eat about half fresh and freeze the rest for later use,” he said with a smile. “Our wintertime favorites are blueberry muffins, blueberry pancakes, and blueberry buckle. They’re hard to beat.”
