Bird feeding offers at Jersey Plants Direct! Feeding the birds is a simple hobby that is rewarded by you seeing lots of unusual birds appear in your garden! It’s wonderful to feed them each day and they’ll keep coming back. You’ll get a variety of birds in your garden when you start feeding them and you can put certain foods out for different birds.
If you have robins come in then dried meal worms are their favourites! They are quite beautiful to watch and they’ll often come and watch you when you’re digging in the garden too. They’ll keep their eye out for any worms they can spot!
Blackbirds will come and have a stamp about on your lawn for insects as well as eating any food that you put down on the ground. They don’t tend to use the bird table so it’s best to share a bit of food away from it for them.
I’ve put peanuts out in their shells before strung up and got jays appearing to eat them – this is like magic for some birds toy just put out a type of food and they’ll appear to eat it!
Most birds will love eating peanuts. They’re high in calories which makes it a good quality food for them. You do need to put it in a squirrel proof bird feeder though else squirrels will unhook, rip open and generally make a nuisance of themselves to get at the peanuts. They don’t eat them all either and will spend hours taking and burying them. It’s quite fun to watch though. You can get special types of nut feeder to stop the squirrels from stealing them.
Sparrows will adapt and use a bird feeder if there’s no seed on the ground. They are quite acrobatic and it’s fun to watch them compete with the various types of tit in the garden for seed. Coal tits are the tiny ones that have a black and white stripe on, the blue tits are blue and the biggest ones are the great tits! You should get a bird book if you want to get good at spotting birds!
Always make sure there is water available for them even if it’s only a small container. It’s best that it’s shallow so they can bath in it. This is fun to watch too and the birds all love having a water bath! In the middle of summer you’ll also spot them having a dust bath but by autumn the soil is too wet! They need to bath and preen to keep their flight feathers in good order and to keep themselves warm. Feeding and watering the birds should become a daily ritual as they get used to coming in for food.
Some people wait until it’s cold to feed the birds but you can start now and feed all year round. The birds will eat less in the summer months when their natural food supply is higher but the extra boost means they can do better and this will help the general population of birds in your area.

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What creatures do you get in your garden? We’ve had lots of wildlife in our garden over the year and it’s strange the things you take photos of. I’ve got photos of some pretty speckled slugs and of a jay!

If you haven’t already started feeding the birds then now is the time. Garden Bird have a great selection of food and feeders. I’ve discovered that stringing peanuts in a shell on a string I can tempt the Jay into the garden. If you’ve got squirrels then you might need to look at squirrel proof feeders as our local squirrel has learnt how to tip the seed out of the bird feeders!
You can give the birds lots of scraps too, from fat off meat, bread, potatoes (cooked) and biscuit and cake crumbs.

This is actually a leopard slug and is very different to the usual ones you might have in your garden.

Why not take a photo of the next wildlife that visits your garden?
We’ve had foxes sitting in the rare bits of sunshine we’ve had recently, lots of butterflies on the buddhlea and lots of lady birds appearing over the last few weeks, presumably coming into the house for somewhere warm to sleep for the winter!