The Final Garden Notes

 

feeder

welliesIt’s never easy for our birds to find all the right nutrition they need and it’s even more difficult in the cold days of winter and early spring. It’s up to us to help out by making sure we always provide nourishment and water, and we’ll be rewarded by regular visits, not only from birds which are very familiar to us, but some we don’t see that often. Recent visitors to our garden have been a nuthatch, flocks of long tailed tits and even a rare visit from a thrush.

Garden centres provide a variety of choice bird food from seed to peanuts to dried mealy worms, the latter so loved by robins, but buying these in large quantities can prove expensive, so why not investigate your own larder to see what you can utilise to supplement what you have to buy, such as the afore mentioned products? I can tell you not much goes to waste in our kitchen. If we think it’s OK for the birds we save it and the list is endless and most of it is leftover- cheese, bacon fat, biscuit crumbs, bread, cooked pasta, grapes, apples etc. Before fat balls were on the market we even made our own bird cake – oats, cereal, sultanas, currants, nuts, bound together with melted fat and cut up when solidified. If you grow sunflowers, save the dead heads to hang in from a branch. They don’t look very attractive but the seeds are full of valuable nutrition and the birds love them.

Does anyone remember a pheasant which was a regular visitor to gardens on Walston Road many years ago? We used to put out peanuts for him and eventually he became quite used to us and would feed from our hands and we grew quite used to seeing him around.

This is my final piece in its present form, having provided the magazine with gardening notes since it was started, during which time many aspects of gardening have been covered, and I feel I have very little else to say. However if someone would like to take over from me, please get in touch with the editors.

 

In the meantime, if any reader has a gardening question let me know through What’s On and I’ll do my best to give you an answer.

 

From the Editor

Rumor has it that someone has volunteered to step into Trevor's Wellingtons.   Watch this space for when Trevor's Garden may morph into The Wenvoe Garden Guru

 

scroll05