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Please don't tidy it up too much this autumn and winter.
Wildlife, insects and bird life are struggling more than ever.
Nettles left to die off and the dried stalks are places for insects and bees to hibernate.
Piles of damp leaves are food sources for birds and small/large mammals, also places of shelter for frogs and toads. Seed heads provide food for birds and small mammals.
A little wild patch can provide so much.
Also some water left out in a small dish will encourage all sorts of beasties.
A perfect garden may be easy on the eye, but not good for the environment.
Agreed. I promise that if I had a garden it would be an overgrown mess.
Mine is a state right now! In Switzerland I'd be in jail.
A good idea for a thread, no mow May should be the catalyst for change. As I’ve posted before there’s lots of easy actions or, in fact, inaction that can help the whole wildlife world. I’ll not cut large parts of my grass until next September, the hedge clippings (cut once in September too) are piled on top of larger prunings to create piles of vegetation with lots of nooks and crannies for creatures. I let leaves pile up where they land and over the years the woodland I’ve created towards the top of the garden has become established and actually very easy to maintain. As well as a lot of bird and insect life, the dogs enjoy it too!
Can get behind this 100% borders are being left this year to do there own thing
TBF, my garden is a state through the winter…
year round here!
Agreed. I promise that if I had a garden it would be an overgrown mess.
Agreed - most of mine is an overgrown mess. Even the joints between the patio slabs are overgrown with violets, cowslips, dandelions and grass. My lawn hasn’t been cut this year, it’s grown a bit lank, and the rain has flattened it. I’ll trim it down and leave it, but I’ve been collecting loads of wild flower seeds from some grassland I often walk over, and in particular yellow rattle, which parasitises on grass roots, and controls it. Hopefully it’ll start to take, seed itself, and I’ll keep collecting more each year to add to it.
There’s one area I try to keep clear of weeds which I’m planting with clematis around a rose and some other plants as a memorial for Jo.
Ours is a right mess. Other priorities has meant we've Don precious little for the last year or two in ours. Its an appalling jungle wildlife paradise already.
I'm feeling rather virtuous now.
I left the leaves last winter and it killed my lawn
Will take them up and build a big pile in the corner.
Already found some nature making a home under the composter, must have been out because the earth I stamped back down the hole hasn't budged.
The rest of the critters can stay, they're welcome.
TBF, my garden is a state through the winter…
Just winter? Showoff.
Having read this thread I feel much happier about the mess wildlife habitat that is our back garden.
More out of lazieness then design, but my chives are now flowereing! lol!
Just harvested some chillies and garlic, but also have lavender (which is dieng back now) and a bunch of other herbs that I didn't harvest, and randomly flowered...
...I definitely noticed a lot more bees and butterflies in the garden this summer, and also slugs!
It looks a total mess, but I'm not going to tidy it up untill the weather gets colder and things die back anyway. But there's a bit more of an eco sytem going on.
I'm trying to to think of some Buddhist proverb...sometimes inaction is the most powerfull action. Something like that.
It's working for me with my approach to tending to my flower beds, I can at least confirm that!
I learnt just a couple of years ago that chive flowers can be eaten just like the leaves. If you pinch the flower in the middle then all the florets separate, it makes for an attractive potato salad (also with some leaves chopped up). Or any other dish where you want chives, but that's my usual.
My emboss was torn about his badgers, which he liked but they spent most nights trashing his garden.
Just a tiny part of any garden left with fallen leaves, uncut or just plain given over to nature will help.
I do rake up the leaves from the centre of our lawn, then they are collected, put into bio-degradable bin bags to make leaf mulch. Any other leaves on the path or on the lawn edge will be dealt with by worms and provide grubs for the birds. Nature is wonderful and if enticed into a wilder space, the bugs and slugs will get eaten by the birds and mammals.
I've also left many 'weeds' that nature has grown in the place they need to be :o)
@mattyfez Don’t worry about slugs, many years ago I used to creep around the garden removing slugs. I now leave them and the population appears to self balance. I believe some slugs are territorial and so help police the others! Slugs clear up dead vegetation and are in turn food for birds, frogs, toads and rodents.
sorry, I’ve just repeated bunnyhop, neglected to press “submit”!
We've the best part of 1/2 acre, probably 50/50 lawn & beds etc - to give a sense of scale I walk 2.1 miles when I cut the grass.
Some parts are kept manicured whereas other parts are just left alone.
We compost all compostable garden waste and generating an excess of quality compost.
I we had more time AND were more bothered it would look nicer, but we like the more natural look (and we are very rural) - loads of birds and animals (keeps the rat man busy...).
Word of warning though, water left out over summer is good for mosquito larvae, and while I enjoy nature f*** mosquitos. I'm sure they have a purpose, but I hate them.
I control the growth on mine just enough to be able to spot the dog eggs before it's too late!
I will rake the willow leaves that are currently covering the bottom of the garden and the veg plot into a pile instead of just mowing over them.
I've created a few log piles around some of the borders already and have fenced off other areas to stop the dog destroying them
Never felt better about being a lazy gardener! 👍👍
Had a wander up to the woodland bit of the garden today with my wife and the dogs. Where I’d spread home made chippings (mostly damson/blackthorn prunings) it was covered in these fungi- they looked lovely in the sunshine. They’re redlead roundhead I think.
I think my hedgehogs are back ...obviously they're my hedgehogs, sod the neighbours. We had three regulars but then they vanished, however I saw suspicious droppings the other day ( what a sad life I lead) so the wife put food out in our ,in theory, catproof feeding station and its gone. Camera is going out tomorrow night ..
After finally catching up with 'Gardener's World' I was appalled at the piece on artificial grass. Apparently there is an estimated one in 10 gardens covered in plastic lawns.
Big organisations such as the RHS have banned plastic grass and the science gathered around how bad this stuff is for biodiversity, the environment and climate change is clear.
One reporter on Gardener's World likened it to spreading hundreds of shredded plastic bags in a garden.
Yet of course the Government has decided not to ban it.
We all managed decades ago without this dreadful man made stuff, once again humans are damaging nature.
Rant over :o)
One in 10 covered, or one in 10 have a piece? Not that I'm in favour. It probably has one or two reasonable uses, but not many.
I like a tidy manicured garden but plastic grass, no thanks, horrible stuff in every way. Something we could happily live without, along with paved over front gardens.
Our next door neighbours have inherited plastic grass from the previous owners. It's quite sad. There garden consists of a huge garden building , decking and plastic grass.
There are a few plants in a raised bed.
If you look at the garden makeover programs they are all about hard landscaping, sitting areas, buildings , fire pits and barbecues.
Any mention of wildlife seems to be an afterthought.
Wildlife for many people is on TV.
Gardeners world seldom mentions wildlife.
As the leaves drop from my Acer, I rake a lot up and pile them under my cypress hedge, which stays dry, where the hedgehogs can drag whatever they want into their sleeping boxes to supplement the meadow hay I put in to start with. My silver birch leaves are very small, but I rake up as many as possible and mix with the Acer leaves. My compost bin is pretty full, so excess grass, leaves and hedge clippings will go in the garden waste bin. <br />One of my front hedges, mostly Pyrocanthus, has died off, it’s at least sixty years old, it was already there when I moved here in the early 70’s, but one end has been colonised by Holly, and I’ve transplanted several holly plants that self seeded, and they’re showing new growth, and I’ve been collecting wild rose hips, hawthorn berries and yew berries, and chucking them all along the dead bit, so hopefully enough will take and fill in the gaps, providing plenty of berries in future for birds. I’ve had flocks of Redwing and Fieldfare stripping the Pyrocanthus berries during real cold weather, so with luck my hedges will attract a wider variety of birds. The sparrows like them to hide in, too.
The hedgehogs are always around, I feed them too well for them to go away! Also my back garden is very porous for hedgehogs they can come and go whenever and from wherever they like. So do the neighbourhood cats… 😝
Tidy garden here. Not my doing though. But a wild space at the end and a gap from our fence to the railway could not be a more wild wildlife corridor if it tried. We also have industrial sized bird feeders (bazooka size) all year (about 2 kilo a week is eaten!) and hedgehog house that has been vacant since the day Mrs TiRed bought it. Maybe this year. Personally, I like the charm of goldfinches who come for the Niger feeder. Up to 12 at a time.
We gave a few hedgehog houses in different parts of the garden. The occupation of these is not consistent.
Some times you also find hedgehogs make their own house in a quite tucked away part of the garden.
Its like the hog feeding box sometimes it's visited every night and then not touched for a few day.
Hogs live by their own rules.
It's been all over social media and many news outlets in regards to NOT putting that dreadful 'netting' over hedges and trees, this halloween. It traps wildlife, birds and bats in particular.
So tonight I look outside and our stupid neighbours have covered our adjoined hedge (mostly their side but a metre or so at the bottom of our drive). I feel like screaming, but am too much of a wuss to remove it.
I really do dislike halloween.
@wheelsonfire
are you sure theyre not wavy caps?
@alric I’m not sure, it was a Google search, I did it with several images so went with the majority! They disappeared about a week later so there was no way of checking, whichever they are I like both names!
Happy to report after a hiatus.
The 'ogs are back. Efforts are being put in place to provide more shelter for them.
Our hedgehogs are back again stealing the cats food!
My biggest concern is protecting the hedgehogs from the dog. She isn't fast enough to catch anything else but a hog caught out in the open is in for a rough time. Currently a two gate system and a quick scan does okay but i need to insert som more resilient planting to provide cover. Whats a nice native shrub thats good for wildlife?
My late Patterdale used to love tearing out to see the hedgehogs at night but she never did more than sniff them, hopefully yours will have the sense not to attack them. What surprised me was how loud they can scream, one was clearly startled by the dog one night.
Ours shelter under a twisty hazel amongst the old rotting tree trunk sections that I have scattered around the edges of the garden. Also in an area where there is a tight accumulation of saplings, again I have put old knotty bits of wood in this area and let tall weeds grow here. They seem to like the leaf fall as cover so I drop some dry leaves near the nesting areas.