The reactions that I have seen from the empty yard remind me of a story. The story is the one about the two shoe salesman visiting a far away land. The first salesman shows up to the first remote village in the country. The weather in the country is such that the people are able to walk around without any shoes. Dejected, the salesman calls back to the head office of the shoe company and complains, “I am heading home.  There exists not opportunity here, the population does not ware any shoes”. The second salesman shows up to the same village. After noticing the same condition as the first salesman makes the call to the company headquarters.  The second salesman excitedly reports that he needs as much inventory as they can spare “because the people are not waring any shoes!”.

So the garden is an empty slate.  The house my wife and I purchased before starting our family had a similar condition. The front was landscaped.  The back was not. There was literally nothing. It was completely empty. We had a landscape architect draw up plans and we implemented them ourselves. It is a great feeling and sense of accomplishment to do the landscaping of your garden.

I plan to help Donna design and layout the back yard garden. We are going to put in a solar bird bath in the new flower bed along the north side of the home. We will put a hanging bird bath in the existing tree in the back yard. We want to attract humming birds so we will be planting brightly color flowering plants throughout the garden. Several hummingbird feeders will be strategically placed throughout both the front and back yard.

I hope Donna takes the approach of the second salesman and is optimistic about the opportunities afforded by the blank slate that is her new garden.

The first attempt at adding a bird house ended with utter defeat.  The first weekend of every month my wife and I go down to the local home depot to take part in the Kids Workshop program.  This is a program designed to get kids interested in work working projects.  Incidentally, Grandma works in the electrical department of this home depot and she love the opportunity to show off two of her grand-kids.  So, this weekend in question the project was a window bird house.  So the kids donned their orange aprons with all the pins from previous projects and started making the window bird houses.

Well these window bird houses were square boxes with the obligatory entry hole on one side and on the other side a clear plastic cover.  This clear side was supposed to be up against the window so you could see in and watch the birds as they did the things bird do in their homes.   The bird house also had hooks on the top of the house and it came with two standard suction cups.  The idea, as you can imagine, was to attach the bird house with the suction cups to a window so you could watch the birds.  Well my first thought was great.  This is going to be very easy to install.   Just stick them to the window and we are done.  So I go ahead and do this.  The bird house detaches from the window and falls in about three seconds.  That is when the wife says….”just clean the window first”.  After a few minutes with the windex and a cloth I reattach the suction cups to the window.  This time it took almost thirty seconds for the suction cups to detach.

At this point I knew it was a bad idea.  Have you ever tried to explain something like this to a two and three year old?  Sorry guys this is just not going to work!!! Yeah, right.  So Grandma gets some fishing line and some eye hooks.  We install the eye hooks in the top of the bird house and string a large loop through the eye hooks and attach to eye hooks above the window.   The hope was the the suction cups would hold to the window if the weight was taken off of them with the fishing line.   No such luck.  Now the bird feeder was just swinging in the breeze after detaching from the window.

The moral of the store is that you should just get a bird house that is designed to attach to a tree.  The birds want a secure, safe place to call home.  If the birdhouse is going to be moving around they will get nowhere near it.  You can get a blue bird house in either a kit form or in pre-assembled that will securely attach to a tree or poll.