best place to buy cheap wild bird food

elsien

While we're on the subject of wild bird food, does anyone remember a grabbit or freebie towards the end of last year for 5kg of bird food for silly money? I've done a search and I can't find it anywhere but it was definitely something I found on here somewhere.
The birds preferred the food to any of the cheap ones I've bought, and there was much less wastage, but I can't remember the on-line company I had it from. I've thrown the packaging away and can't see it on any of my cc statements. Any suggestions anyone?

JustMom

Hi, I recommend ebay for the cheapest ,I recently bought 20k for 9.99,freepost. Quick delivery too.

gordikin

JustMom wrote: »

Hi, I recommend ebay for the cheapest ,I recently bought 20k for 9.99,freepost. Quick delivery too.

Have you got a link? Cheapest I can see is £15.99. Thanks.

MKS

Have you tried Costco? Can't remember what we paid but it was half the price of Pets at homes' one.

GSD_Lover

Cost co got offer on wild bird seed & fat balls 4-2-13 to 24-2-13. Well worth a look

Ken68

12.75kg at B and M for £4.99......this was last month.

torbrex

I am looking for 'no-grow' wild bird seeds at a reasonable price, any suggestions please.

VanMan2007

I use Kennelgate at Chilwell, Nottingham. They do a good quality aniseed mix which the birds like: 15kg for about £9.65.

Def recommend.

Floozie

Home Bargains or Poundland!

valk_scot

I made an effort to cut bird food costs this year by making as much home produced bird food as possible and using sources of very cheap or waste human food.

I grew a couple of dozen large sunflowers in an odd corner of the garden, using sunflower seedlings that had germinated in the ground under the bird feeder. I dried the heads and I cut these up and put them out on the bird table like slices of cake. Very popular, they got picked clean.

I grew a patch of seed bearing wild flowers under the sunflowers. I also let a lot of my garden flowers run to seed at the end of the season rather than pruning them early, then clipped down the pods and stored them. You can get lists of plants suitable for this on the RSPB website. On the allotment I used to have a couple of angelica plants every year which produced kilos of seeds, but they're too big for the average town garden.

I keep an eye on places like B&M and Approved Food for suitable feed items. I got suet from AF last year for 15p per 500g and also a catering pack (5KG?) of dried fruit and B&M sells very cheap seed mix. My DD and I make batches of "fat balls" using value lard, suet, the cheap seed and fruit in various combinations.

Stale bread soaked in the dripping from the grill pan. Also skin from roasts (crackling is vile stuff), skin from roast chicken, bacon and gammon rinds.

Melon rinds and fruit peelings go down well. I also save the windfall apples from our rather grotty apple tree and put them out over the winter, in quarters. Pumpkin seeds from the kids' Halloween lanterns, pumpkin/squash rinds, apple and pear cores.

I do put out a limited amount of stale bread but it has to be soaked, either in fat or water. White bread is a waste of time as it fills the birds up but gives them sod all nutrition, but seeded bread is okay.

I regularly find coconuts reduced down to 5p in the Whoopsie section of our local Tesco. I always buy these.

As to more expensive foodstuffs there's an old fashioned ironmongery type place near us where they sell bird foods by the kilo, scooped from sacks. I buy peanuts, sunflower seeds and niger seed from them in small quantities, probably no more than a kilo of each of the first two and a couple of hundred grams of the third for the whole winter. They cost about half the price of anywhere else and I use these premium foods to bulk up the nutritional quality of my "home made" foods.

I don't buy meal worms, but when I'm digging or weeding in the garden I keep a jamjar near for any pests I turn up. Not worms, obviously, but caterpillars, woodlice, any suspicious looking beetles and every single slug. When I finish for the day I tip the jar out on the bird table. It's usually cleared within ten minutes by the birds. It's amazing how many pests you can turn up even in winter.