If you are like us, you’ve experienced this problem before. You purchase a lovely hanging flower basket (or you are lucky enough to be given one for Mother’s Day, your birthday, etc.) and a little birdie decides to take up residence in it.
How to Keep Birds From Living in your Hanging Flower Baskets
We have a few tips and tricks that we think you may find helpful when Miss Tweety decides to inhabit your little bit of summer heaven. Don’t get us wrong, we love birds. We love nature. We love flowers too, and just don’t like when one decides to live in the other.
- Insert picky things to make the space uncomfortable. You can use wooden skewers (get these at the dollar store or the butcher), toothpicks or the tops of plastic forks (use clear ones for more of a hidden solution). The idea is to insert them into the soil to create an area that is not comfy for the bird to rest in.
- Take the picky things a step further and use sewing thread to criss cross around the skewers or forks, making it even trickier for the bird to find a nice spot to nest.
- Soak a cotton ball in ammonia and place it on the dirt in your plant. You may have to do this every few days as the ammonia will air out or wash out from watering the plant.
- Buy small rubber snakes and coil them up in the dirt in your plant pot. Birds don’t live where snakes are, and Miss Tweety won’t know the difference from your snake versus a real one.
- Place something shiny nearby. Birds don’t like shiny things typically so if you line the rim of the pot with aluminum foil or place a metallic pinwheel toy in the pot you are likely to keep the birds away. You could also hang a shiny windsock nearby or even a couple of old CD’s (think of them as garden art).
- Place a few mothballs in the pot; most birds do not like the scent.
- If you see that a bird has picked your basket as the lucky winner for her new home, you can thwart her activity by removing her nest progress daily. Hopefully she will get discouraged and move on.
