PlantAdvice.co.uk

If you're fed up with the constant uninvited intrusion of birds into your otherwise exquisitely maintained vegetable patch, but have developed a green conscience, then here's a neat trick for you.

Grab some old potatoes and stick a load of feathers around the middle of each potato forming a ring of feathers. Then thread some string through the potato perpendicularly to the feather ring.

Now find a suitable place to string up your low tech bird scarers in the garden. The wind should catch the potato "windmills", rotating them around on the string, rustling the feathers and hopefully scaring off your would be intruders.

The potato and feather bird scarer is a simple device, mentioned in a gardening book of 1858, but thought to date back much earlier than this, as far back as the 16th century.

Examples of this traditional method of scaring our unwanted feathered friends away from the vegetable patch (pictured) can be seen in the beautiful open gardens of Anne Hathaway's cottage near Stratford-upon-Avon, maintained by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.