What a week weather wise! I don’t know if you’ve had floods, freezing temperatures, driving wind & rain where you live, but we certainly have up here in Northumberland. The crops are soggy and battered whereas last year they were droughted off and suffering with extreme heat. We’re hoping that the weather will stabilise a little this week so we can make our haylage crop for Winter horse fodder for our Livery stables, but there again we hoped we could do that three weeks ago. The gardens are so green & the water baths for the birds most definitely have not needed filling, although the keeping the feeders filled has been a constant job. I’ve been watching soggy little sparrows just out of the nest lining up at our bird table (thankfully a covered one) being shown by the adult where the easiest grub is. The poor birds were struggling to...

Chris has been making more of our Laverock No Waste Wild Bird Food today - the one that the seeds are coated in Aniseed Oil, lots of you comment on this food and it is one of the first ones we made and is still just as popular with our customers today,  as the birds just keep coming back and back to the feeders. It has some great high energy ingredients including sunflower hearts, safflower, groats plus cut maize, Niger seed & canary seed, cut maize & more. We call this our No Waste bird food as all of the seeds are without shells so there should be no waste in your garden. People have confused this by thinking that the seeds are no mess, ie. the seeds won't grow in the garden if they drop. For this to be the case they would have to be heat treated, sort of...

Chris and I visited our new pond and woodland today, the pond has filled nicely, the deer fence is up, and the trees are now being planted so there is major progress for our farm project so I thought I'd share it with you on this lovely day. It was such a lovely uplifting morning to visit the site, the sun was shining, the dogs had a great walk and sniff of the hedgerows, and the lovely birds were singing, it was almost deafening! I saw my first skylark, ok Chris pointed it out to me, and I heard it singing as it flew past otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what it was, but hey, now I do. The site looks huge, it covers almost ten acres, so it is going to be a substantial woodland for a bird and wildlife haven on our farm, it’s been a few years in...

We’re often asked in the shop which birds eat what types of food or is one mix better than another? While there’s no hard & fast rule regarding feeding I usually say that the smaller the seeds the smaller the birds they will attract. We make a few different mixes to attract all types of birds to your feeders, but some people find that some mixes work better than others and there are also obvious factors regarding how sheltered your garden is, or if you own cats which can affect which birds you will attract. Our Laverock Hall Deluxe Bird food was one of the first mixes we made many years ago. It is our what we call entry level bird food, it will attract birds to your feeder and will feed all types of birds, but it does contain wheat so will be useful if you wish to attract pigeons...