Living In Harmony With Your Garden
The basics of setting up a wildlife friendly garden.
One of the greatest ways we can live in harmony with the nature around us is by setting up our gardens (or even just a balcony) to be as wildlife-friendly as possible. It’s also great for supporting our other practices like providing a sit spot because it will mean you attract a lot more insects, birds, and animals to your garden so there is a lot more to see and learn about.
Our world is facing a biodiversity crisis with humans causing the 6th great mass extinction of species in the history of the earth. You and me and everyone else are directly responsible for the mass extinction of millions of insects, animals, birds, and plants around the world, and especially in our own local areas. The question is - what can we do about it?
If you have a garden, then one answer is to make your garden as wildlife-friendly as possible. Many species of wildlife are reliant now on our gardens, especially in the city because the rest of the country is often covered in farms which use pesticides which poison not only the insects but the water supply and all the creatures further up the food chain. Gardens become a vital refuge for what few creatures we have allowed to remain in our world. There is a reason they say that if all the bees and pollinators died out, humanity would only live for 4 further years.
The Basics
So let’s first explore the key components of a wildlife garden…water, food, shelter, and access.
Water
The single best thing you can do for wildlife is provide a source of water. Water is life and nothing survives long without it. This can take many forms - a pond (even a small one in a tub), a bird bath, even a bowl of water placed down for hedgehogs to drink from (or put some stones in it and insects like bees can land there to and drink from it).
If you do add in a pond there are a few things to be aware of - to stop it freezing over and killing everything inside in winter, make sure that there is at least one part that is 3 feet deep. Also, to stop creatures like hedgehogs falling in and being unable to get out, ensure one area has a shallow beach area down to the water and within the water so they can get out easily. Try to fill the pond with rainwater not tap water due to the chemicals in it. Never transfer water/ creatures or plants from one pond to another due to the risk of spreading diseases. Finally, do a bit of research about the types of plants you need to put in the pond (only use native ones) - submerged plants (oxygenators), floating plants (to cover some of the surface and reduce algae growth), and marginal plants.
It’s also a great idea to have tall grass/ plants around the pond to give creatures shelter getting into and out of the pond. It’s also a good idea to have a big log poking out over the pond to allow dragonflies to rest on it and some reeds growing out of the pond to allow dragonfly lavae to climb up out of the water.
Food
There are many ways to provide food for wildlife -
A variety of flowers and plants provide nectar and food to many insects (you’ll need to do some research on the best ones for pollinators or other insects you want to attract). When it comes to flowers, try to have something flowering at all times of the year so there is always food available.
For example, you can get bulbs that will flower right from January (e.g. snowdrops) through to June (alliums). Do some research and look at what works in your area. Blue/Purple flowers are particularly attractive to bees. You can also attract moths by having some night-scented plants too. Trees can be especially good because they have blossoms or flowers in spring/summer and then seeds, fruits, and nuts in autumn so a double provision. While many flowers will die off by late autumn, you can still find plants that will flower in winter too.
Now you might say - well I don’t like insects, or I want to grow food so I don’t want to be overrun by insects. Fair enough but remember that everything exists in a web, so if you get the bottom layers right - the soil and insects, everything further up will thrive too. The reason many gardeners struggle with pests is that they are not attracting those further up the food chain to take care of them. For example birds, wasps, ladybirds e.t.c. will all take care of your aphid problems. And frogs and hedgehogs will take care of your slug or snail problems - you just have to make sure your garden will attract them.
Another thing you can do is to provide bird feeders. It’s good to have a variety of foods of these so that you can attract a wide range of species - peanuts, sunflower seeds, nyjer seeds, mealworms, and fat balls will all attract different species. Just remember to ensure the containers are cleaned weekly to prevent disease spreading and keep peanuts in the right type of bird feeder to prevent them access the whole nut and feeding that to their chicks who could choke.
You can attract things like hedgehogs by putting out specialist hedgehog food or even cat/dog food (but never fish)
Another great way of helping birds and other mammals is to ensure there are lots of natural food sources like fruits and berries. This can be done by planting trees and bushes, or even a hedge. Ivy is a particularly good plant to have because it provides both shelter and berries for the birds in the winter months when very little is available.
Having a pile of logs somewhere in the garden out of the way is also great as the rotting wood provides habitat and food for insects and they then attract in frogs and hedgehogs e.t.c.
Shelter
The third crucial component for wildlife is shelter - a place to live or hibernate. There are many things you can do here - providing a pond is shelter, as is having tall plants around it.
A tree or bush is a great shelter for many insects and birds and often also acts as a place for birds to nest in. If you can, put in a hedge as that provides a whole range of shelter and food throughout the year for wildlife. You can also buy a bird-house to put up but remember to face it east or north to stop the chicks getting too hot in summer. There are also specialised bricks like swift box bricks you can build into your home if you are doing a renovation to provide a shelter for endangered swifts. Bats also appreciate special bat boxes which you can put up high on your house.
Many creatures like to hibernate for Winter e.g. hedgehogs, frogs, and reptiles. By having a hedgehog box, frog house, pile of leaves, or compost heap (it gets nice and warm inside) in your garden, you can provide a great shelter for these creatures. Reptiles can also be encouraged in by putting a sheet of metal down on the floor in a sunny spot and leaving it undisturbed. When you come to clear up any fallen leaves in your garden - putting them in a pile in the back of a border somewhere is a great way to provide an easy hibernation shelter for animals.
Bee hotels and insect hotels are also great and can be made very easily and cheaply at home (I would avoid buying them as they are usually not good enough or big enough to attract many insects). Make sure the bee hotels face south so they get lots of sunshine. Many creatures hibernate in the stems of plants throughout the winter so try not to cut dead stems etc back until spring to give them chance to get through the cold times. Don’t be too tidy with the garden (when it comes to nature conservation, being a bit lazy is the key).
Talking of laziness - if you have a lawn, consider leaving an area of it aside for the spring and summer where you don’t cut it during that time. This will provide a lot of great habitat for insects, birds, and other wildlife to survive and thrive. It will allow many wildflowers to thrive and you may be fascinated by what was hiding in your lawn but had no chance to come up before because it was cut too frequently. You can even consider putting in a small wildflower meadow if you have the space.
Important for the survival of many creatures is avoiding the use of pesticides, weedkillers, and herbicides in your garden. There really is no excuse now for the use of these chemicals in our gardens as there are so many better options, and these chemicals wipe out not just the particular creature you are trying to kill but many other living things in your garden too.
The basis for a good garden is its soil and so building good soil is essential not only for healthy food and plants, but also for the insects, birds, and animals that call the garden home. The best way to do this is leave the soil as undisturbed as possible (no turning it over anymore each year), using mulch on the soil to reduce evaporation and weeds, and doing a covering of new soil each year in areas you want to grow things, especially for food. All this builds the health of the soil, lets life flourish and improves the quality of the plants and food grown in it.
Shelter does not just mean a home but also a place to lay their eggs. Many insects in particular need specific plants for their young to eat and will only lay their eggs if those plants are present. Loss of many of these plants is directly contributing to the species going extinct. Therefore I recommend emailing your local wildlife charities and asking them for advice on what the best plants are for the insects of your area.
A final idea for shelter is to create a dead hedge - if you have an area that is out the way and you don’t know what to do with, or you need to create a barrier between two spaces, why not put in a dead hedge. This is normally a thin area where you chuck the wood and branches from pruned trees etc in and it provides a stack of wood, which builds up over time like a hedge or thick fence.
Access
This is all about how the wildlife can access the garden. So many people now are putting walls or fences around their entire garden which stops wildlife like hedgehogs accessing it. If you do have such a fence or wall, an easy way to help out is to create a small 13cm square hole at the bottom of the fence which will be big enough for a hedgehog to get in but small enough to keep pets etc from getting out. Also don’t forget to make any pond easily accessible for hedgehogs to drink from and to get out of again (using a sloping beach) if they fall in.
Conclusion
Making your garden, balcony or small space wildlife-friendly is something you can do easily and pretty cheaply to help Nature in your local area. It is one of the best ways you can make a difference quickly (and see the difference you are actually making) and to learn to live in harmony with the natural world around you. In most cases it doesn’t require a lot of work, in fact, it usually requires “not doing” something instead of doing it - not cutting the grass, not putting pesticides on or digging the soil, not raking up and bagging the leaves, or not putting up a fence. The way of Nature as Lao Tzu teaches is “Wu Wei” - non-doing and yet “everything is accomplished.”