We receive many requests for "How to" live the Tasha Tudor lifestyle. Storey's Country Wisdom bulletins offer practical, hands-on instruction designed to help you master dozens of country living skills quickly and easily.
Excerpt from the booklet "When I moved with my husband to upstate New York several years ago, I brought along a lifetime interest in bird identification. It was not long before our 1 1/2 acre plot, adjoining a small swamp area, meadow, and woods became the focus of serious backyard bird watching. Our property is particularly attractive to bird life, with well-establish ash, dogwood, hickory, juniper, magnolia, maple, oak, spruce, sumac, and. many other berry-bearing and nut-bearing trees and shrubs. To these, we have added annual and perennial flowers and herbs. The lawn is a compact mass of chickweed, crabgrass, dandelion, dock, plantain, sorrel, wild strawberry, vetch, and violet. The edges of the woodland and hedgerows are crowded with clover, goldenrod, jewelweed, milkweed, mullein, phlox, and many other wildflowers. It is, indeed a garden plentiful with natural food for birds in summer and all.
To enhance natures' bounty we have supplied a small pond, birdbaths, well-stocked feeders, and nesting boxes. When we are privileged to witness the birds' territorial claims, courtship, nesting, and parenting habits, we feel all our kind and conscientious efforts are worthwhile. Yet, there is a giant bonus in cultivation the friendship of birds. What is not always obvious in the beginning is soon apparent after a summer or two -- the birds provide a most effective ecological control of insects, weeds, and small rodents in the gardens and orchards. In the spring, with young in the nest, meat-eating birds feed voraciously on the insect and grub population. During late summer and autumn, there are many seed-eaters that do a handsome job of cleaning up the weeds. The result is a naturally healthy garden.
Birds can be attracted to your home if you offer food, water, and shelter. Trees and shrubs that yield fruit, berries, seeds, nuts, and cones will provide food. Tangles of wild plants and dense undergrowth left to thrive in chosen areas of your property, log piles, dead trees, and stacked branches will provide shelter, protection, and natural nesting and roosting sites. Nesting boxes can be secured to trees and posts to attract bluebirds, purple martins, wrens, downy woodpeckers, flickers, robins, and other species. Birdbaths or pools can be built to supply water, and feeders, strategically placed around the yard, will furnish supplementary food for the birds when natural sources diminish. Such pockets of refuge can be created on as little as a quarter-acre plot, and costs for a bird haven can be kept to a minimum."
32 pages
5 1/2" x 8 1/2"
