Helping wildlife in autumn If you feed garden birds, do it regularly, so they won't waste energy visiting your garden in vain. Put out a nut/grain mix and high fat feed for a balanced diet. Create your own fat blocks with melted suet or fat skimmed from cooking, add chopped peanuts to attract starlings, ber r ies for f inches, or dr ied mealworms for tits and robins. Pour into a baked potato skin or a coconut shell and hang out of reach of the local cats. If you buy fat balls, take them out of their plastic nets and put into metal holders so that birds can't get their tongues caught. (Honestly, it does happen!) Use wire mesh feeders for peanuts and seed feeders for smaller seed. Entice ground-feeding birds such as thrushes and blackbirds by placing mealworms, raisins or chopped over-ripe fruit in a seed tray raised on a couple of bricks. This lets water out but keeps feed in and is easily cleaned. Finely chopped bacon rind and grated cheese encourages small birds such as wrens. Provide a shallow container of clean water at ground level. This will benefit other garden wildlife as well as birds. If you have room, try growing plants like teasels and sunflowers, or trees and shrubs such as rowan, cotoneaster and pyracantha, for their seeds and berries. Clean up dropped bits if you don't want to attract cats and rats, although the new plants you may discover growing from dropped seeds each year can be pretty interesting. You may find millet, rice, safflower, hemp, linseed, cumin and teasel among them. Be careful while turning compost heaps. The warmth provides a comfortable spot for frogs, toads, hedgehogs and other animals, which may also be sheltering or hibernating in a wood pile intended for burning, so check before setting light to it, or better still, leave it for them. Leave hollow-stemmed plants unpruned until early spring. These can provide homes for over-wintering insects. If you are more interested, cut off the top and bottom of a plastic bottle, push a piece of loosely rolled up corrugated cardboard into it and place in an undisturbed corner of the garden to shelter ladybirds and other insects that will eat next year's pests. We can all get pleasure from helping to preserve and encourage the surprising variety of wildlife we have, with or without a large garden, and most of these suggestions can be achieved in a back yard.


Feed me !


A drunk phones Alcoholics Anonymous. “Is that AA?” says the drunk.


“Yes.” Says the receptionist. “Would you like to join?” “No” says the drunk. “I’d like to resign.”


Everyone should pay their income tax with a smile. We tried it but the insisted on real money.


Life


The first half of your life is ruined by your parents. The second half is ruined by your kids.


A new extensive and very expensive Government survey has revealed that over 60% of all domestic violence is due to disagreement.


There are over thirty words in the Irish language which are the equivalent to the Spanish “Manana,” but somehow none of them convey the same sense of urgency.


7.


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