How to attract wildlife into your garden

You might be aware that there are many awareness campaigns at the moment regarding bees.

Bees are responsible for pollinating up to one third of the food we eat and Einstein said that when the bees disappear, humans will follow within four years.

But it’s not just bees that are important.

We rely on many insects and other wildlife to keep the delicate ecosystems of our planet balanced and healthy. If our planet is healthy, WE can be healthy too.

There are many things you can do at home to encourage wildlife into your garden and yard:

Bees

Encourage bees to your garden with the VIP treatment: make a bee hotel and plant flowers that bees love.

Here at Chez Green favourites include comfrey, marjoram and roses. Bees like a variety of colourful flowers close together that provide nectar all year round, so don’t just opt for summer blooms!

Make sure you provide water too – a bird bath or small pond will be perfect.

Frogs

Most of our neighbours use slug pellets, but did you know that frogs and hedgehogs will happily eat slugs for you? This means you no longer need to buy toxic slug pellets which can harm domestic pets and children.

Encourage frogs to your garden by making a small garden pond. Pond pumps help keep the water clean and you can get pond filters from companies such as Bradshaws Direct.

Don’t be a perfectionist!

Tidying away leaves and every last weed upsets the biodiversity of your ground.

Leave bits of decaying wood from trees and shrubs or even small logs to rot into the ground and provide housing for beetles, grubs and fungi.

When the leaves fall, don’t gather them all to make leaf mould, leave some on the ground to provide shelter for insects. If you’re very proud of the aesthetics of your garden find somewhere to hide these ‘messy areas’ – behind a shed or under the hedges for example.

Native plants

By choosing native plants you can benefit the environment in many ways. Native plants will thrive in your soil which means less use for fertilisers. Plants specific to your area will be hardy and resistant to pests meaning less pesticide use too.

In addition native plants can cope with the local temperatures and rainfall which means you can conserve more water as they take what they need from the surrounding soil and rainfall.

Companion planting

Companion planting is an organic method of growing plants and food. The idea is that certain plants benefit one another whereas others compete for light, water and nutrients. By choosing companion plants the risk of disease and predators is greatly reduced; resulting in less requirement for toxic chemicals to solve a problem.

Onions and carrots are a prime example; onions give off a scent that masks the smell of carrots to the carrot fly. Garlic grown around roses is said to deter pests and make the blooms flourish! And if you plant mint next to cabbages it helps repel the cabbage flies.

What about you? How do you keep your garden healthy, eco friendly and organic?