‘Make do and mend’ as my Yorkshire father likes to say and determined to reduce, reuse, recycle after the excesses of Christmas, I’ve ventured into a spot of DIY. There always seem to be offcuts of wood cluttering up the shed and although ever since school DT projects my construction abilities have been the butt of family jokes, I managed to produce three new nest boxes for different areas of the garden. They might not be perfect or pretty but I’m hoping that won’t put their potential owners off. The fun part was deciding where to put them. One is positioned in a willow on the banks of the pond – there were reed buntings there last spring and I live in hope. Another sits in a hawthorn which is always alive with house sparrows. The last is hidden away in what we grandly call ‘the spinney’ and targets woodland birds.
Nest boxes are of course just one of the many ways you can encourage wildlife into your garden. Bird baths from old sink bowls, bee houses from bamboo canes and of course, best of all, not doing anything. Leaving an area of your garden, no matter how small, to nature, is often overlooked for more ‘hard engineering’ methods, but it’s a lot easier than sweating over a saw.
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