Mon July 31st, 2023
Sadly, also a true story. Happily, Portulacaria afra are very resilient. The jades were eaten at the start of the July, and all three plants are budding now! They should hopefully recover without too much issue.
We also visited a bonsai nursery last week, and I wanted to ask them if they had any advice for sparrows eating our jades. It was very strange to me, because we had the jades out last year, and the birds didn’t touch them
I was expecting this to be a normal issue, and that there would be some sort of advice we could follow. To my surprise, the bonsai keeper said he had never heard of sparrows eating jades before! The reason I was interested in asking him was because I had tried to search this issue earlier this month, and was surprised that I couldn’t find anything about it. It being uncommon explains why my search had been fruitless.
However, he commented that, “They must have been thirsty.” This would make sense,because of how much water jades store in their leaves. There was a heat wave here last month, which could explain why the sparrows had demolished our poor jades in search for some relief from the heat.
We’ve been trying setting out a little water bowl/bird bath for the sparrows since then (just an empty planter tray we’ve been filling and emptying each day). The sparrows haven’t been touching it so far, but the weather also became cooler since our visit to the bonsai nursery. The sparrows haven’t seemed to be picking off the new buds that are sprouting, and hopefully if it becomes hot again, they’ll go for the water bowl instead this time.
Fingers crossed for our tiny jades!
No Comments