February's garden

Thought I would try and keep a diary of the garden over the year. Missed January but never mind!

Clearing moss off summer house roof

Here are a few photos for this month

I love these winter flowers

Planting salad seeds with Amy

More Hellebores

We planted some of the strawberry runners
 out under cloches

Digging out compost to fill up the raised beds

Can you see the worm scaling the wall!

Spring is on its way - hooray!!!

Big Garden Birdwatch

Well I'm a little late posting this but we took part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch last weekend.

Here are the children, binoculars ready, looking out of the window ready to start the count!

If you've not participated before the idea is that you choose an hour anytime over the weekend to observe your garden and count how many birds of each species that you see.  The records over time help monitor trends and get a picture of whats happening in the bird population for example numbers of house sparrows and Starlings have fallen since the 1980's. The RSPB will investigate and try to find out why this is happening and what we can do about it.

Our count this year was as follows:

Blackbird     3

Blue tit         4

Great Tit      2

Magpie        4

Robin          1

Woodpigeon  2

Carrion Crow  3

Greater Spotted woodpecker   2

No Starlings for us this year - last year we had 21!

The boys and I all completed a page in our journals on birds.

Make sure you add this to your diary for next year - its always at the end of January and a great project to support.

Constellations!

We'd planned a nature walk with some friends on Wed but the weather has been really wet and so we opted for an indoor activity instead! I found this idea on pinterest here.

The boys have asked if we can learn something about stars so thought this would interest them.

I printed off the sheet showing the different constellations and we used a push pin to make holes where the stars would be. Luke enjoyed using the hammer and nail to make a large viewing hole at the end of the pringle tin! We then decorated the tubes to make them more interesting.

Unfortunately with watching 2 mischeivous toddlers at the same time I forgot to take photos of us making the viewers but here are the end products.

The circles stuck onto black card and holes made through each dot

Viewing the constellations

Hopefully we will get some clear nights so we can see if we can spot the constellations outside.
We hope to arrange another visit to The Observatory in Todmorden. We have been before a while ago but its definately worth a visit. Its open to the public on Sat evenings - but make sure you wrap up warm.