If you’re wondering why fat birds are spurning my bearded irises here’s why!

We’ve had a lot of rain this summer and the bearded irises in our garden have come into bloom again.

In fact the leaves have shot up to twice their previous height.

However, although the flowers themselves are not quite the standard of the spring blooms they are displaying on longer stems.

In my earlier posts about irises I wrote about how the flowers were being eaten off by birds.  I told you how in early spring all my prize blooms were cut off just under the flower heads.

The frustrating part is that it was done in a matter of minutes virtually before my eyes.  That is 100 per cent true because I remember how on one particular morning after inspecting the irises, I went into the house for a few minutes to get a  piece of tin foil to wrap around the base of a magnificent bloom.

It only took seconds but when I went back into the garden I found that my prize iris had already been chopped off.

Frustrating?  You can only imagine how I jumped up and down in frustration.  But it didn’t help very much.

Now the interesting thing is that earlier in the year, the flowers that were decapitated were among the very first flowers to emerge in Spring.

But even stranger is the fact that now that we are in mid summer there have been no decapitations at all.  Every single flower head has remained intact. The only difference is that the flowers are not of the same high quality as the spring flowers.

So were the birds becoming too choosy?

Yes, Exactly! And that seems to be the clue to my problem.

The logical reason appears to be that in early spring the birds are starving and look for every tasty morsel that they can find. Those iris blooms in all their glory can hardly be missed.

But at this time of the year the garden is so full of “tasty comestibles” that they can’t be bothered with the irises. There is so much to choose from. Who needs an overgrown iris?

So my strategy for next iris season is to hang up pieces of fruit near the irises and hope that the birds will go for them instead. I don’t know if it will work but I’m going to try.

When it comes to gardening we live in high hopes!