Having a concrete bird bath you will not only help our feathered friends on hot summer days, but also decorate your garden or yard. Of course, you can buy a ready-made water dish and just place it where you want. There are hundreds of interesting variants offered by the manufacturers. For example, it can be an angel (a fairy-tale hero, an animal) holding a bowl on his head; it can be a painted flower decorated with mosaic.
But you can make diy concrete bird bath with your own hands, creating your own design and saving your money. It doesn’t require much time and efforts. There are just few simple steps which should be followed by to have such an element of decoration in the garden.
Here is an example of a simple concrete drinking bowl in the shape of a leaf. To begin with, it is necessary to prepare such materials: cement, water, sand, thin polyethylene film, a piece of old pipe and a leaf (rhubarb, burdock, fern or any other one with a clearly distinguished veins).
Start the work with the concrete bird bath bowls.
- Lay polyethylene film on a firm surface (a wooden board, a piece of metal).
- Put wet sand and form a little hill using it, so that the bird bath could accumulate water inside of it.
- Cover this little hill with a piece of polyethylene film and put a leaf (rhubarb, burdock, fern) on it.
- Make a solution. It should not be too liquid. You can either buy a ready-made concrete mixture at the hardware store or mix sand with cement by a ratio of 3 to 1. Such mixture should be diluted with water.
- This solution should be put on the leaf, thus a thickness of this layer should be about 2 cm in the middle and about 1 cm at the edges.
- Make a stand-support for liquid dish. For this purpose insert a piece of plastic pipe with a diameter of about 10 cm and the length of 10-15 cm into the center of the water dish. The pipe should be filled with cement solution.
- Cover the product with polyethylene film, leaving a gap for ventilation, and wait for its drying (at least 2-3 days).
Then just put off the polyethylene film and remove the leaf from the surface.
You can also decorate the water dish painting it. There is a place for your fantasy here, but use only non-toxic concrete sealer for bird bath not to poison the ones who will drink here.
To protect the birds from cats or dogs a drinking bowl should be set on a high stand. It is better to use rain or melted water, and it is necessary to refresh it from time to time.
