Beautiful Natural Bird Bath

I've had some limestone lying around after putting in my pond last year, I've been amazed how much more nature has been in my garden since. Birds, bees, dragonflies and even newts.

I had been meaning to use some the spare stone for something useful for a while.

With the Stone, Concrete, Cement contest coming up I thought I would give this a go.

1. Safety glasses, there are loads of flying stone chips.
2. Safety mask, also loads of dust.
3. Hearing protection
4. A rock.
5. Angle grinder.
6. Stone cutting disc.
7. Lump hammer.
8. Brickwork chisel.
9. Add water and birds for fun.

Please don't forget the safety gear, cutting stone can be dangerous.

I wanted to make sure the bath was large enough to be useful once I had cut out the bath.

Once I had selected the appropriate rock I selected the face that I was going to cut. To enable me to place the bath I needed to flatten off the bottom.
With a carpenters pencil I traced a line around the rock, then mostly managed to follow the line with the stone cutting disc.

The main thing here is to take it slowly, there is no point in trying to cut 15 mm (0.59 inch). It's much safer to make a few shallower passes, this also means if you stray from the line you haven't gone too deep and ruined it.

Here I turn over to the video.

After marking the bottom line in pencil, I lightly trace the line with the cutting disc. This allowed me to check that it was going to line up all the way round. Once I had established the line I continued to cut along the line to the depth of the disc. Unfortunately the depth of the disc wasn't all the way through, so I had to do this is three steps.

The bowl itself was again marked out in pencil, this time I cut down as far as I can making sure I stayed within the marked line, each cut was made between 10 - 15 mm (0.4 - 0.6 inch). Once I had cut down as many times as I could fit within the lines using the chisel I chipped out the rock. This process was repeated until I couldn't get any deeper.
Note, that I was using a 115 mm (4.5 inch) grinder disc, if you wanted a deeper bowl with a larger stone and larger disc you could do so.

You can see the final measurements of the bowl in the images, the water sits about 40 mm (1.5 inch).

The final location for the bowl was to be on the edge of the pond.

There is this really annoying little section at the front of the pond, annoying because I can't mow it and it has to be cut by hand. By putting the bowl here I could kill two birds with one stone... While using the same stone to water the birds 😉

To blend it in and try to make it look a little more natural I planted a few plants around it.

If you've found this helpful please don't forget to vote for it in the contest 😁 Thank You 😁