Protect Your Seedlings From Birds Using These Dollar Tree Staples

Birds can be a wonderful addition to your garden. Cheery hummingbirds dart from flower to flower, showcasing their jewel-like feathers as they pollinate your plants, and charming songbirds fill your backyard with the music of nature, while munching on harmful insects. Birds are natural visitors to your garden, and some people even go as far as to add plants that attract a diverse variety of birds. However, even if you're planting fruit trees and berry bushes that songbirds love, you may not want them pecking at your seedlings before they're established. Thankfully, by using just a few Dollar Tree items, you can protect your seedlings from birds in a safe and humane way.

Most bird species tend to avoid landing somewhere with shiny, reflective surfaces, and sudden movement and noises can make a landing spot unappealing to your feathered friends. As a result, while you may want to avoid these features if you're trying to build a yard that birds flock to, utilizing light and sound can be a great, harm-free way to keep birds out of your seedlings.

For this project, you'll need just a few Dollar Tree items, specifically the Crafter's Square galvanized metal icons and the Garden Collection metal plant hangers. There are also ways to recreate this hack with items you may already have on hand.

All you really need for this hack are the aforementioned Dollar Tree items or something similar. The galvanized metal icons come in packs of three, while each plant hanger is sold individually. Depending on the layout of your garden and how close your seedlings are, you'll likely want to have a plant hanger for each seedling.

Once you have the right number of supplies on hand, this bird-averting project is easy. Simply drive the plant hanger stake into the ground near your seedling, and hang one of the icons by the attached twine. The metal icons will catch the sunlight as they dangle, creating bright reflections that will help deter birds from making a snack out of your seedlings. Plus, when the wind blows, not only are these galvanized metal icons light enough to move and swing, but they'll also occasionally collide with the metal hanger when doing so, creating a sudden noise to keep birds at bay, like a single-tubed wind chime.

There are other ways to keep birds away from your seedlings as well. Depending on the type of plant you're growing, you can begin your seeds indoors using a DIY biodegradable starter pot that lends itself to easy transplants, allowing you to put your plants outdoors when they're better established. Or, you can recreate the metal hanger DIY using materials you have on hand, such as old CDs or shiny pinwheels that rotate in the breeze. You could also try planting more bird-friendly plants away from your garden as a form of distraction.