Make Your Own Bird Food: Simple Recipes to Entice Birds to Your Garden(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016) by Mark Golley is a guide to creating the most popular and successful bird food recipes for your home and garden. Adapted from success stories, popular ideas, and childhood memories these recipes bring many different varieties of birds to feeders and tables where friends and family can enjoy their company.
This is one of the few recipes in the book that actually has a specific measurement! For those with an aversion to metric measurement, a pound of lard will do for this wonderfully messy recipe.
Ingredients
- 1 ⁄2kg (1lb) lard
- 1 jar crunchy peanut butter
- 5 cups cornmeal (available in many wholefood shops) – crushed stale cornflakes/rice crispies make a good substitute
- 6 cups quick-cook porridge oats
- 2 cups sunflower seeds
- 2 cups raisins
Method
- Cut the lard into smallish blocks so that you can soften it sufficiently when mixing in other ingredients.
- Once soft enough, put the lard blocks into an old mixing bowl and add the peanut butter, cornmeal and porridge oats.
- Using your hands, mix everything together.
- When you are happy that all the ingredients are well mixed, divide the stodgy mess into half a dozen ‘portions’ and roll them into ball shapes.
- Finally, roll these balls into the sunflower seeds and raisins.
- Suspend the balls from your bird feeders inside some sturdy netting, or place the balls inside a bird feeder.
- Alternatively, form the balls around sturdy twine and tie them to nearby branches. Then it’s time to wash up!
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Excerpted from Make Your Own Bird Food: Simple Recipes to Entice Birds to Your Garden by Mark Golley. Copyright © Mark Golley 2006. Published by Bloomsbury, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. Reprinted with permission.
