My Childhood
Growing up, my mom always had something growing outside, and my dad was hanging houseplants from a beam he installed. While we lived in the Chicago area, we always had some kind of yard. My dad's parents always had a huge flower garden and a huge vegetable garden...at least, to my eyes. My wife's father also routinely had a vegetable garden going.
Our Own Home
When my wife and I bought our own home in Saint Paul, Minnesota, we got a standalone home in the city, with a double-sized lot. The previous owners had planted a number of hostas and other perennials hardy for our zone 4a location. There were mature trees -- Colorado Blue Spruce, maples, crabapples, a plum tree of some sort, a mountain ash, and many others I didn't recognize -- and it was a nice place to be. It even has a Concord grape vine!
We had to remove some trees because of their location. One was right by the house wall near the kitchen window, for instance, and another was crowding a post with a yard light on it and knocking it over. Some severe weather, like winter air temperatures below -30°F (not wind-chill!) and wind storms, killed some others.
My wife started doing some vegetable gardening. She canned tomatoes, pickled some bell peppers, and even made grape jelly from our own grapes.
But then we started having kids, and we didn't do much with the garden except plant tomatoes, and sometimes some herbs. We didn't have a plan.
What Happened in 2019
I was with my daughters at an orienteering event in a park. At the visitor's center, they had bird feeders with a tally sheet for Project Feederwatch. This is a bird-counting project for bird feeders done during the fall and winter; it is citizen-science, where regular people do the observations and make notes on what they see.
This intrigued me, so I signed up for it. The last counting weekend just happened, so we would have to wait until the fall to start our own counts. In the meantime, there were a number of things I could do.
Birdscaping
One of the things I learned was that you should "birdscape" your yard to encourage birds to come visit. Just putting out a feeder wasn't enough. Birdscaping entails:
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