Peter Donegan Garden Design & LandscapingI take a lot of photos. Most just while I’m out and about. Some in a garden, some not. Some I just found intrigued me. Rather than simply delete them, I felt I should do something with them. As a btw I’ve tried to keep repeats and sets of images out.
If the mood strikes me, I’ll do it for December….
The bird box has always been something I’ve queried. I don’t know why. I just feel/ felt that they would always be better off making their own. Is that fair to say….? Either or, I wanted two in the garden just for the craic of it. You know, to see would they come.
These two bird boxes were made some weeks ago from an old timber wine box and given a lick of whatever colour was nearest/ lying around paint.
Fairly simple to make, they are also another variation of if I got these as a gift would I be impressed ? You better believe it. I’ve seen sites selling these for upwards of €30 each.
My Total Costs. €0.00
If you fancy having a go making them yourself… bear in mind, the bird really doesn’t care if you have not been meticulous in your efforts and from your aesthetic perspective, depending on your skills, a lick of paint will hide everything a lot.
The only things I really need to be careful of is that the box itself isn’t south facing. Logic applies here so you don’t cook the birds. Other than that its keep it about 2-3 metres off the ground and although there are site suggestions of when you should put them up…. I’m not going to pay any attention to that. If the winter guys wanna nest in them, it’s there for the taking. If not they’ll be there for the summer fella’s.
The only note I will make is not to tighten the screws too much so you can flip them over and tip out the previous years unwanted nest.
I could give instructions on how these were made, but the photos say it all pretty much.
More birds to help me eat my raspberries next year 😀
I had gone in search of some feedback for the website recently. I felt it needed a few tweeks here and there. Although not via comments, the answers came back in very I didn’t wish to sound like I was insulting you sort of a format.
Outside of the sites text it seemed I was missing some really good high quality photographs of myself.
You are after all the business. You are Peter Donegan. I don’t wanna go searching through a website to see what the man I will do business with looks like….
Fair point. I had some good images, but they were very random…. I rang John Mc Williams. John took this photograph that I’ve been using for some time now. He’s also a good friend. Honest enough to say I like and because. But more than that he is also an extremely talented photographer.
We met on a Sunday. Spent a few hours together. As always with John, it was also time that I enjoyed I should add. We narrowed it down to variations from about 10 images.
The beauty about them is that because the quality of those taken is so high they can become black and white, low to high resolution, head shots or back to colour again at the flick of a button.
Whether it’s for media usage or just for the site…. I have to say to the time spent was a very wise investment on my part. Of course I’m just one of a host of stars Mr McWilliams has had the honour to photograph 😉
Is that Carly Simon I hear playing…. Thanks John 🙂
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Coccinellidae or ladybirds as we know them are members of the beetle family, generally red with black spots head and antennae and can be anything up to almost half an inch in size. But with over 5,000 species they can also be any colour from yellow to black. The less prettier and often referred to a the mealybug Ladybird cryptolaemus montrouzieri should not be confused with the Coccinella septempunctata or what I should refer to as the common ladybird
The ladybird is most famed in horticultural terms for being predators or the boilogical control of the aphid [whitefly or greenfly] and they really are a gardeners friend. That said if you spoke to my niece Lilly… they are most famed to her because she had a pet ladybird once…. but it ‘flew away‘ 😉
Ladybirds and other garden predators are/ can usually be encouraged easily by having areas of undisturbed ground and also by the introduction of attractive flowers.
I spotted this guy above just sitting pretty whilst clipping some crataegus in the garden yesterday…. 😉
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I wrote about it over on Ballyboughal.net [thats my home town] but whilst I was out on a photowalk around Dublin City, on a Sunday afternoon, the landscape looked so pretty. Pretty amazing to be quite honest. [I’ve put some more pics of the day over on Pix.ie]
For those not from Dublin or Ireland and don’t know, the above is a seating area beside a bus stop, right beside the quays 😉 Pretty amazing ? It makes me smile and I must add looks so perfect surrounded by snow….
By the way if you are wondering why this is on my landscaping greeny blog…. well first today was very much about the great outdoors. And it was just that…. great and outdoors. Second…. anything that is to do with people being happy deserves a standing ovation 😉 see below….
The photowalk as a by the way was with thanks to Vodafone and their photo competition Cheer Up Ireland where you upload pictures of what makes you happy/cheers you up. The prize for the overall competition is a €3,000 shopping spree at Dundrum shopping centre.
A big note of thanks to the lads at Simply Zesty for a great day. Great to see people smiling…. 
Thanks Dena…..
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