There's a few things you need to know before we get started here.
One is that our outside life here in the city is limited to spring and fall. Many features others might want on their porch or in their yard that are directly connected to hot summer weather, don't really find their way into our plans.
Flowering plants that have their heyday in July and August, for instance, just not going to get much attention from me. Unless of course they are very self-sufficient. (I'm considering hostas for a planned for garden in the shady back.)
All things spring, however, I'm all over that. And later, much later, I will be happy to decorate the porch for fall...then Christmas. Like that.
A reminder in this. Our place is new. There's still LOTS to be worked on in terms of setting up landscaping and gardening. This spring, in addition to a few upgrades to my meager attempts at early season gardening, I have been able to add a bit of love for the birds. Started with a bird feeder and some birdseed which has attracted a pair of cardinals, two blue jays, numerous grackles and sparrows, and a few others I haven't actually identified yet.
I'll have to sit outside longer to get better pictures of the customers. For now, here's not such a bad shot of the cardinal, given the zoom and screen detractors.
All this has led to me wondering if a birdbath would help welcome our feathered friends. And that leads me to the other thing you need to know.
A value we've adopted and are trying to apply here on the common property we share with our son, is one where frugality and creativity combine to compel us to seek out items that could be repurposed instead of purchased new. There's enough 'stuff' on the planet already. Let's see how we might give something a new life before we just dump it in a landfill somewhere. This value is something our son is teaching us, and I'm really enjoying the divergent thinking of it, and the satisfaction when something comes together.
And so, back to the birdbath.
What might happen if you took an old metal chair frame, found a bowl for five bucks at the thrift store, and realized it fit perfectly into the rim of the chair seat? Then, what if the bowl was a little too deep for birds to have that shallow place to splash about, so you took an unused Corel dinner plate from a retired set of 20 that's not being used by anyone anymore because you already have so many other plates you like better now.
And what if that dinner plate fit perfectly into the inner circle of the too-deep bowl? And then, what if you just put that all together, filled up the bowl until the water was covering the dinner plate, and added a few decorative stones scoffed from another pile you already had arranged on the porch?
And what if then you filled out the 'setting' of the birdbath with a weird-cool, fits-in-so-many-differently-styled-corners, metal spinny thing your sister in law got you eons ago, and put it right beside it, so that the birds would have another place to perch? And added a spring flower from the grocery store and put it in a very old tin pitcher that came from underneath the cottage at one point, and put that beside the weird-cool metal spinny thing?
Ta da!!
I am pleased, if I do say so myself.
Now. All we need is for the birds to think it's a good idea. Hence, the experiment is still an experiment.
The birdbath and the bird feeders, two of them, are positioned so that if I'm sitting on our couch, I have a direct line of vision. I may ask Ken to take out the screens on just those two windows to see if I can get some pictures, should we have visitors. I do hope so. As of this writing, no one has needed a bath yet. We'll see.
If anyone can see any problems with the design, or can give me more hints as to how to attract feathered friends, I'm all ears.
So that's what I did with the later part of the afternoon yesterday. Not bad for Monday, since I was also able to get a decent amount of desk work done as well. Off to a good start for the week.
Tuesday, here we come.
