Make Your Garden Wildlife Friendly!

Making your garden wildlife-friendly can be a great way to make your flowers grow. The grass can be greener and the garden a more welcoming spot overall. No matter the size of your garden, balcony or local greenhouse allotment, you can make your outdoor space welcoming to all kinds of wildlife.

This entails making your garden healthier and plants growing faster.

Adding a bird bath feature is one of the simplest ways to encourage creatures to visit your garden, which will help aerate the surrounding soil. Bird baths are known to attract birds that will eat bugs, thus helping with garden pest control.
They can also attract wasps, which are key predators of pests (such as cabbage worms) that love to eat your garden crops.

Including a variety of different plants in your garden, including trees, shrubs and flower-rich borders can create a range of places that will encourage small insects to congregate. They will have everything from damp soil, shady retreats and accessible hotspots, allowing them to get some sun.

If you have a lawn in your garden, try to let some of it grow longer (be creative with it!). You could leave patches of grass around bushes and flowers to grow longer. Alternatively, using a lawnmower, you could create a footpath in the taller grass (kids love it).

Much like the Bird Bath feature, bird feeders will encourage both birds and squirrels into your garden. Bird feeders help birds to survive, especially during the summer and winter seasons, when food and water can be harder to find.

Bird feeders also support birds, to compensate for habitat loss in the local area. If you have any trees in your garden, you may even have a few birds creating their nests!

Help birds compensate for habitat loss and climate change.
Bird feeders are particularly valuable in urban areas. Most research shows that well-fed birds are able to build better nests, lay stronger eggs, and raise healthier babies.

Although this may not be for everyone, adding some form of water feature opens up an entirely new world of possibilities, whether you’re looking to have a fish pond feature or a water source feature.

When thinking about integrating a man-made fish pond into your garden, it may seem like a lot of effort. However, once you do your research, they surprisingly do not require much maintenance and look great all year round.

Side note: When conducting water changes, don’t throw away the “dirty” pond water. This contains a lot of nutrients much like manure, recycle it! Use it in your landscape beds, you’ll see breathtaking results.

If you’re going for a water feature, you may find that wildlife creatures such as wild birds and foxes may drink from it when passing by. Over time, you may notice more snails around your garden which are great for the soil and your grass. It is possible that you might even have a few frogs in and around the area. Although the amphibians spend the majority of their time on land, during the spring they migrate to water when breeding.

A small amount of compost and log piles will encourage amphibians into your garden if accessible.

Being mindful of the type of products you’re using on your plants to help them grow and the chemicals used when cleaning in and around your garden is vital to having a wildlife-friendly garden. Any type of product which disturbs the links in the food chain will have a negative effect on your garden, for both the creatures and your plants. Ideally, try to stay away from chemicals such as herbicides and insecticides.

If you’re worried about your garden becoming too wild, don’t worry! Having a wildlife-friendly garden doesn’t mean your garden has to look like an untended forest. Simply allocating specific space for taller grass and plants is plenty if you’re just starting out.

Being mindful of the products you’re using in your garden and then the way in which you tend to it can make a huge difference.

If you decide to make your garden more wildlife friendly, we’d love to hear from you!