Gardening for wildlife

[BeverleyBrooks]

Is anyone else trying to make their garden more natural and more wildlife friendly?

I really enjoy gardening and the wildlife it brings. I am now trying to use native plants where I can and to look at other ways to make the garden more habitable for wildlife.

I have downloaded the Seek app and instead of automatically digging up any ‘weeds’ I am identifying them to see if any would be worth keeping as wildflowers. It’s really interesting!

I have a small pond already.

I have cut a hole in the bottom of my fences for frogs / hedgehogs so they can move between gardens easier (inspired by the David Attenborough London nature programme!)

I really want to encourage more insects, butterflies, bees, birds so am actively looking for native plants - instead of just picking up whatever looks good in the garden centre!

I just wondered if anyone else feels the same, I had a quick scroll through the gardening section, but couldn’t see a similar thread.

What a lovely idea. We do try and grow insect-friendly plants in our garden. Yesterday morning I was looking out into the back garden and there was a flock of goldfinches, some blue tits, a great tit, two sparrows and a robin, all flying about and following each other from one bush to another. Gorgeous to watch.

There's another board on MN called Wildlife, nature & conservation, there's bound to be like-minded folk on there.

If you can make some room for nettles in a wild corner, they are food and habitat for a wide range of species, and very good for us to eat too (best eaten before they go to seed).

Im in the process of buying a house with land and will be gardening for wildlife if it goes through. Kate Bradbury does some good books on the topic.

Ah thank you, that’s probably the board I need!

We are in a city so get robins, great tits, blue tits, wood pigeons, magpies, parakeets, swifts. We do get quite a few butterflies and bees.

I was in the garden centre looking for plants, and very few were native - probably why they are difficult to grow!

Oh another thing to make note of, most plants from garden centres are sprayed with pesticides. If you’re buying plants, try to find one that doesn’t. If anyone is in the northwest, I recommend bluebell cottage gardens near Warrington. They have a lovely selection of perennials grown peat free without pesticides.

We live in London and gave a wildlife garden - log piles, twig hedges, a stumpery for stag beetles , bird and bat boxes, hedgehog houses, pollinator friendly planting as well as a pond and low water containers . We have so many bird species visit the bird feeders .

Teasles for bees and birds in winter

Sunflowers but leave them up all winter so the birds can pick the heads. You will feel very smug when the gardening shows remind everyone to clean their bird feeders and you don't have to.

Yes! Slowly but surely. The brambles and nettles are probably the most diversity-friendly bit of our space, but the pond and wood pile do well. No mow May has a big impact; we keep wildlife corridors of longer grass, and now only mow paths through the bigger areas. I’d like to do a dead hedge next!

I have a small half barrel style wildlife pond that no wildlife has ever used apart from the birds who drink out of it and Mrs Blackbird who enjoys tugging at the plants I have in it. I kept hoping for a frog/toad but it must be that there are no gardens around with them in so I think I am probably never going to see them in the pond despite my best efforts. :-(

Recently I've managed to get blue tits, occasional chaffinches, wrens, some sparrows and Mr and Mrs Blackbird are back again this year. I lost all the little birds three years ago when the builders took out the enormous clematis montana on the joint fence, I've been trying to encourage them back ever since.

I bought another nesting box during the week and I am hoping the blue tits who seem to be quite interested in it will nest in it. I no longer have a cat so they should be quite safe in the garden.

Fingers crossed anyway. 😃

Evening primrose. Goldfinches love the seeds and I have them in abundance and grow specifically for this. I won’t cut back until end April.

Buddleia- it's not native but will draw in bees and butterflies. Bees are also very keen on comfrey, but it does tend to spread.

@Myblueclematis are the sides of your barrel pond all above ground level? It may be that wildlife can't access it easily. I'm hoping to get something in place this year but plan to build up (probably with grass as that's meant to be a better surface than stone which can get too hot) to at least some of the side in the hope of making access easier.

@BeverleyBrooks and everyone else, this programme might give a bit of inspiration.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011psv

Natives are either really easy to grow and so readily available there's no point in garden centres selling them, or they are so invasive (dandelions for instance) that they turn up all on their own anyway and are a right pest!

I have a rosemary bush in the garden that starts flowering before Christmas and is still in flower now. It is ideal for bees who have woken up in very early spring.

I am also a bit obsessed with the Merlin app for identifying the bird calls!

Thanks @NebulousSadTimes I’ll watch that.

I have a bramble plant at the end of the garden that I allow to grow on the fence - I do remove the brambles from the main bit of the garden otherwise they would take over, but keep one bit at the end. The birds really enjoy the berries (as do we).

I have a herb patch with oregano and got lots of moths on the flowers last year - gatekeeper moths and mint moths - they were lovely to sit and watch.

I really love the leaf cutter solitary bees, we have a garden table that happens to have round holes in the underside (that’s how it came, not deliberate!) that they love and they return every year. It’s a bit tricky sometimes if you are out there eating an meal and a little bee comes zooming down carrying a big piece of leaf! But we have learnt that if you leave them alone, they leave you alone. Their only intention is to build a safe space for their eggs, and I do admire them. They seem to like using the hydrangea leaves, I guess because they are large and flat.

Buddleia is fantastic for the insects, especially butterflies. If you leave the flower heads it provides shelter for insects then food for the small birds. There is a shrub called Japanese honeysuckle?? (I think). Produces loads of berries which are much loved by the blackbirds. I will double check the plant name

My apologies its Himalayan honeysuckle.... really lovely plants.

I have a little wildlife garden, we have loads of birds, a hedgehog and a toad 😁

A bird feeder for the birds.
The insect friendly flowers seem to be lavender, foxgloves, perennial wallflowers, salvias, perennial geraniums.

Having a little messy area that has wood/sticks in it for beetles.

Having a couple of fruit trees.

My lockdown project was a very large wildlife pond. It’s now full of newts and we have hundreds of dragonflies and damsel flies every year along with pond skaters, water boatmen, water beetles, sticklebacks, frogs and toads (although the newts out compete the frogs unfortunately).

Absolutely, I have a suburban garden and have been working to make it a wildlife haven. My favourite changes include mixed native hedging (especially common dogwood), log piles, a meadow area and a large wildlife pond full of newts and toads. I’ve found native plants, like foxglove, really easy to grow from seed and plugs (check out: meadowmania.co.uk). I also try to be mindful of wildlife with every decision I make, eg I wanted to add some lovely David Austin roses but I made sure to choose the open bee friendly varieties. I love my garden - it sings with birds and insects.

I wildlife garden too! I love seeing so much wildlife making use of the garden. I have a small pond, I leave most stalks etc standing over winter then when I take them down it's not till at least March, I leave a lot of plant materials lying on the ground and most of it seems to just get integrated back into the soil.

A few years ago I looked into good pollinator plants and these seem to be the favourites in my garden:

• buddleia
• vipers bugloss
• greater knapweed
• teasel
• globe thistle/echinops
• salvia
• hemp agrimony

I took over my new garden three years ago and haven't used any chemicals here since then. Year on year I'm seeing more insects and birds - it's really noticeable how many there are already this year.

What I've really noticed is that a chain of insects has developed because I don't get rid of any pests. The first year I had a lot of aphids and I held my nerve and let them be, then some kind of predator came in and took them. This year I've been finding empty snail shells on the paths with a hole in the shell so I hope thrushes are having a good meal.

I try. In the back we have a mini pond with a mini stick pile and plenty of stones and bushy plants for frogs to hide amongst. I use to sweep the neighbours tree leaves up and bin them, but this year chucked them behind the shed for the hedgehogs to enjoy and forage in (we usually have at least one around). We do have a gap under the gate, and one in a broken fence for hedgehogs to move through (fence isn't mine). Out the front I've tried to let the lawn grow wild flowers. It gets rather messy but we get so many bees and butterflies. At the moment I have forget me nots, wild violets and a small yellow flower im yet to ID but I haven't seen before. We also have grape hyacinth and the usual dandelions and daisies.

Ah I didn't realise snail shells with holes were eaten by thrushes! I've seen quite a few of those this spring. Likewise we get overrun with snails but last year it didn't seem so bad, but I also saw more slowworms last year than I've seen before so maybe they were eating them!

@NebulousSadTimes

The barrel is sunk into the border so getting in and out should be easy. I think after five years or so of waiting for something to actually go in there, I may as well give up and say it is just an ornamental small pond that the birds seem to like. 😆

I do try my best in a reasonably small suburban garden. We have a hole in the fence that I've seen a hedgehog passing through.

I try and plant lots of different flowering plants and no double flowers.....open varieties for the pollinators to access. We also have a bird bath, a nesting box and a couple of bug hotels.

I'd say the main thing we do is not tidy up too much! I sweep up leaves but then pile them onto the borders as mulch and for insects to nest in. We leave plants over winter before cutting them back and I do a lot of "chop and drop" so when I do have to cut things back I just leave them on the ground as much as possible....it all eventually rots down and feeds the soil anyway and my borders are quite densely planted so a lot of it is hidden.

Have you got a few plants in and around it? Mind you I can’t really talk as I’ve only had snails and one toad in my pond 🙈😂