Gardening Companions...and Homemade Bird Feeders

I'm never alone when I'm gardening; I always have a companion hovering close by waiting for any worms I happen to dig up.  This year I have two companions; first of all, a lovely female blackbird (above) who sits and watches me until I throw her treat (she usually gets a piece of apple). Not that I get any thanks for this, because every year female blackbirds attack the lining of my hanging baskets for nest material and every year my hanging baskets come a bit closer to total collapse...

The other companion I have is a robin (below).  I'm always amazed by how bold robins are; I've known them come into the house as well as eat from my hand.  And they're great opportunists when it comes to worms, often dipping down right by my feet to seize one.

We always want to encourage more birds into the smallholding, so we've been adding more bird feeders and, to save money, we've been making these ourselves. I've mentioned before about converting old car exhausts to bird feeders (after being rescued from a local car mechanic's scrap metal bin) and that these turn out to be stronger than the plastic feeders we've bought in the past...

By converting these, I like to think that a car can actually help the environment for once!

We've also made a low bird table for the robins and other birds that prefer to pick their food from the ground.  This has been made from scrap wood with a fine wire mesh.

And here it is being tested and approved...

We also find that the standard plastic chicken feeders don't last long and so,when the last one broke, we bought a galvanised feeder. But it didn't even reach the chicken pen, because we were inspired to use it for something else altogether - and now the tops of several galvanised feeders have been wired up as light shades in the barn...

 

The barn owl next to the light is a wood carving we bought on holiday as a fun addition to the barn.  At the moment, it's the closest I'm getting to photographing a barn owl, until I can actually take a decent picture of the barn owl I see flying in the next field. 

In the cottage garden patch, it's about time to pull up last year's evening primroses.  They look untidy, but I leave them, because the seeds have been so loved by the goldfinches throughout the winter.  And there are always flocks of different finches each winter in the trees on the edge of the smallholding, so we do get a variety of them on the feeders.

But there's still no sign of any wild birds' nests on the smallholding this year and I'm sure I usually see the first young blackbirds by the end of March.  I haven't heard a chiffchaff yet, either; there's usually one calling in March from the scrub around the smallholding.  I'm guessing that the cold weather is holding everything back here - and so there will be a rush of activity, when the warm weather eventually arrives.