Wildlife Friendly Garden

As well as attracting lots of wildlife to your garden, a wildlife garden also gives you an excuse to be a bit lazy with the gardening from time to time! It isn’t just about bird boxes and ponds; just as important are areas of unkempt garden and piles of logs and sticks.

We don’t have huge garden here, but it is always nice to see wildlife in it so we do various things to attract wildlife. We have several bird feeders offering peanuts, seeds and fat balls. We have a few areas of unkempt garden with wild flowers and grasses growing in them. We have a little nest box on one of the trees at the bottom of the garden.

As far as maintenance goes, then we try to leave dead seed heads and such like for a while before cutting  them back. In fact we try to leave most cutting back until spring. We keep the use of pesticides and other chemicals to a minimum. We also have piles of dead wood, compost bins and heaps of sticks all of which help attract wildlife.

It does work too. We have had 24 species of bird to the garden, frogs, toads and newts,  numerous butterflies and moths, grass snakes, and as far as mammals go, hedgehog, rabbit, squirrel, mice, bats and even a ferret!

If you want to know how wildlife friendly your garden is and get more hints and tips then Natural England have set up a website called the Big Wildlife Garden. You can add you garden to it and list the features that you have. Our garden is on there and the latest few things we have done mean we have 53 points and a gold certificate! I think I need to build a bird bath next.

How does your garden fare?

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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