The Martin House

Finally...the Martin Birdhouse is up. My new birdhouse is better than the old one and it has a new feature: a weathervane. I didn’t want to spend the 50 bucks it cost to buy one so I built my own out of plywood. I used part of a flower fence for the base and parts from an old light fixture to make it rotate. I cut the letters N S W E out of plywood and then I painted everything black. And the best part...the thing actually works. Now I know where the wind is blowing from.
There are no hinges for the doors on this one. The doors lift in and rest inside a slot at the bottom. I’m quite proud of my new design. It will be easy to clean out the house in the fall.
Getting the house on to the pole was not an easy task. Like everything I built it turned out large and heavy, but with my wife’s help, a rope, and a lot of moaning and groaning we managed to straighten out the pole with the birdhouse on top without it falling onto our heads.
A pair of swallows already checked it out but they left again. Perhaps it is too new for them. But I don’t have to worry about tenants. I didn’t even have the doors in place yet when a nosy sparrow made its first inspection. Now it sits on one of the perches and is calling for its friends to come and move into the new apartments. There are twelve apartments and they are nice and roomy.
I also put up the finch feeder and the humming bird feeders. Yesterday we saw the first North American Finch. The weather is getting warmer and the birds are coming back.
I tilled my garden and I’m ready for the planting and seeding, but that won’t happen until the end of May. The size of my garden is about 850 sqft. Seems large but sometimes it is almost too small for the vegetables I want to grow.
My wife always tells me I’m planting too much, but we manage to eat it all. What we don’t eat we give away. There is nothing better than fresh picked beans and homegrown tomatoes. And we love the peppers. I usually plant about 50 pepper plants. In the fall we make sauce and salsa and freeze it.
I tilled in 33 pounds of Clay buster and 50 kg of dehydrated Alfalfa Pellets, which are actually rabbit food. They are a wonderful organic fertilizer. I’ve been using Alfalfa pellets for years in my garden. In addition I tilled in 8 bags of leaves. Last year, in the fall, I tilled in the same amount of leaves and they have decomposed over the winter. I should have good soil this year.
My tomato plants are coming along nicely in the basement and should have developed plenty of roots when it’s time to set them into the garden.
Here is a picture of my new Martin House: