Hello and welcome to The Compost Bin. I'm Compostwoman and I live with my family in rural Herefordshire. We have nearly four acres of garden and woodland, all managed organically and to Permaculture principles, which we share with Chickens, Cats and assorted wildlife. We also grow a lot of our own food, run courses in all sorts of things and make a lot of compost!

I am a Master Composter and have spent more than a decade as a volunteer Community Compost adviser with Garden Organic and my local Council.
I'm a self employed Environmental Educator so I run workshops and events where I talk about compost, veg growing, chicken keeping, cooking, preserving and sustainable living. I also run crafts workshops and Forest School/outdoor play sessions in our wood.

We try to live a more self sufficient lifestyle here, as best we can, while still having a comfortable life and lots of fun.


To learn more about us click on the About Compostwoman tab and remember to click on the photos to make them full size!


Friday 23 May 2014

Feeding the birds

 #feedthebirds  #rspb

We are very lucky here at Compost Mansions as we are host to lots and lots of wildlife, including lots of birds :)

At the moment I am having to avoid work around the front of the house due to Mrs Blackbird nesting


Can you see her? Click on the photo to make it larger and you can see her yellow beak in the middle of the image.

When we do the Big Garden Birdwatch we always have lots of different birds on our list, and of course we follow the advice from the RSPB on feeding "our" birds all year round. This can be a problem, though, when some of the residents decide to sabotage our efforts by drilling holes in the bird table pole.




This was done by one of our many Greater Spotted Woodpeckers. They come and take peanuts and usually fly to the nearest tree ( we offer them lots here!) to wedge the nut in a hole or crack to eat. But we now have at least one very lazy 'pecker, who hops off the nut feeder (to the right of the pole) and just sticks the nut in this hole to eat! I fear we may need a new pole for the bird table fairly soon.




So I decided to dig out a metal bird feeder pole I was given as a gift ages ago and had never got around to using (sorry, Sue!) to see if that would deter the vandal. It has a mesh food tray, hangers for three feeders and a water tray and I don't think even our Woodpecker will be able to drill into it. I try to put out more food at this time of year so an extra feeder pole seemed a good idea.









The kit was was easy to put together and, so far, the birds love the extra feeding station. The Woodpecker is just taking nuts from this new one and flying to a near by tree to eat them. Hopefully this may fix the pecking problem!


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