It’s that time of the year when we get all of our benches ready for the spring and summer. This includes any repairs and a re-stain with our rather unfortunate poo brown coloured wood preserver. I really wish we had gone for a cedar red or even a medium oak, but to change now would mean sanding down every bench and starting again.

When we started, one of the first things that the nice people from Warwickshire Wildlife Trust told us to do, was look up Opportunity Cost.

OPPORTUNITY COST: The idea behind opportunity cost is that the cost of doing something is the lost opportunity to do something else; in short, opportunity cost is the value of the next best alternative.

Or to put it into an even simpler form, spend all of our time doing stuff that will give us the greatest return.

So unfortunately, poo brown is staying…

We managed to get four picnic tables done today. Andrew made a support to take care of the sagging that is happening to the round benches and it worked a treat on the first one.

The bench height is improved and the whole thing sits much better. We will be fitting the support to the other two round benches next week.

There was quite a bit of work to do on the rectangle benches but they look like new again.

Everything got a good plastering of wood stain and the usual yearly joke of “don’t sit down or you’ll get a stripey bottom” was wheeled out by you know who… It never gets old…

We also had a couple of repairs to existing bird boxes. I’m not sure if the boxes got walloped by falling branches ripped off by the recent storm savagery, or the delinquent squirrels have been partying in a hard and hedonistic way.

This one is in serious need of a total rebuild and retirement to a quieter location. We have broken one of our golden rules though – don’t put nesting boxes close to picnic benches. Far too much of a temptation for bored rodents after too much fighting juice…

In other news, we have a new sponsor.

Dunchurch Pantry is a local foodbank in the village providing emergency food to anyone who needs it. They have generously supplied us with a bat box.

We have stained the box, and yes, you guessed right, poo brown, to make it not so obvious to the hedonistic squirrels.

We have installed it along the hedge-line and tried to get it as high as possible and south facing. Bats use the hedge to navigate and enjoy the warmth of the sun as they do whatever it is that they do in the box.

Let’s hope that we have some happy-batty residents sooner rather than later.

We also filled our bird feeders with some fat balls to keep our feathered friends happy.

I should’ve brought a couple more but at least there is food available.

There’s a fair bit in the pipeline over the next couple of weeks so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime I rediscovered our babbling brook.

We will maybe look at making this a little more of a feature in September.

Until next week!

Paul