Attracting and keeping birds in your garden during the winter is fun and easy! One of the enjoyable benefits of living in a rural area is the wide variety of wildlife that is close at hand. Providing habitat and natural food sources for wildlife will attract birds, bees and other critters into your yard. At our farm, as the nursery and gardens have grown so have the number of birds that visit and nest each year. Last winter our most prominent feathered visitors included: Red-naped Sapsucker, Mountain Chickadee, Wren, Evening Grosbeak, American Goldfinch, Dark-eyed Junco, Quail and White-crowned Sparrow.

If you would like to attract a wide variety of birds to your garden in the winter all you need to do is to provide habitat and food. To bring winter birds in closer for viewing, provide food adjacent to your home in the form of perennials planted in your garden that produce seed heads supplemented by bird seed in feeders.

When cleaning up the garden during the fall, leave your tall ornamental grasses and perennials that produce seeds intact. Let your garden clean-up duties wait until spring and the birds that don’t migrate to warmer climes for the winter will be thankful.

During the summer you can keep deadheading flowers to promote repeating blooms and sturdy stems, but once fall has arrived leave them alone so the maturing flower heads can produce seeds. The seed-heads of perennials are nature's bird feeders for seed-eating birds like sparrows, chickadees and grosbeaks, while the black seed of the purple coneflower serve as food for goldfinches. If your garden lacks natural food for winter birds, try planting next spring some or all of the perennials listed below in the Farm Fresh Living top 12 perennials that every country garden should have to provide food for winter birds:

Coreopsis grandiflora (Blazing Star).
Coreopsis grandiflora (Early Sunrise)
Echinacea (Big Sky Sunrise Coneflower)
Echinacea (Big Sky Sundown Coneflower)
Echinacea (Big Sky Harvest Moon Coneflower)
Echinacea purpurea (Purple Coneflower)
Gaillardia (Burgundy)
Gaillardia aristata (Torchlight)
Helianthus maximilliani (Maximilliani’s Sunflower)
Liatris spicata (Blazing Star, Spike Gayfeather)
Rudbeckia fulgida Goldstrum (Black-eyed Susan)
Rudbeckia nitida Herbstonne (Green-eye Coneflower)


You can purchase these hardy perennials online at Stargazer Perennials or at a garden center near you.