Category: Garden centre

Be Ready for Spring

Be Ready for Spring

Posted on by clive

Be Ready for Spring. It’s called armchair gardening while the weather is cold and we can plan our spring gardens and plan our planting! There’s lots to do outside as well so here’s our guide.

Wildlife Garden

Wildlife Garden

Posted on by clive

Gardening for wildlife (too)

Do you know there are approximately 15 million gardens in the UK? This means if we all made a few simple changes to our outdoor spaces we can create a wildlife garden and we would have a wonderful opportunity to make a big difference to our local biodiversity. 
Take a look around your garden and see how you might adapt what you already have to make it more wildlife friendly. You could provide a few simple basics such as water and food, or create some form of shelter and a safe breeding spot and before you know it, your garden will be buzzing with wildlife. One of the best features for supporting wildlife is a well-maintained pond, which is a haven for birds, insects, small animals and plants. However, if you don’t have the space for installing a pond, even a small water feature will help.

Dragonflies & Hedgehogs

Many of use believe it is a complicated process and perhaps would not fit in with our ideas of what we want our gardens to look like, however, you can adopt as many or as few ideas that suit you.  By just adding a couple of extra features you can still do your bit to encourage the appearance of not only bees, birds, butterflies, ladybirds and dragonflies, but also small mammals such as hedgehogs.

Plants & Shrubs

Have you thought of buying a bird table or asking advice at your local garden centre about the type of nectar rich plants and shrubs that attract birds and bees? Find out about shrubs that bear berries during the winter months and choose perennials such as sedum and yarrow that carry seed heads after flowering as these can provide a vital food source for birds and insects.  Fed up with slugs and snails eating your tender young plants? Make your garden hedgehog friendly and you never need worry again as hedgehogs can eat up to 200grams of insects in one night!

Grow Hedges for hedgehogs

Hedgehogs as their names suggests, live mostly in hedges and in the last decade, their numbers have dropped by an all time low of 25%. There are a number of reasons for this including the fact we tend to put up fences rather than grow hedges in our gardens.  You can provide shelter by creating your own natural woodpile if you don’t keep logs for an open fire or even pile up your autumn leaves in a quiet corner of the garden, under which the hedgehogs will happily burrow.  There you have it, nothing really complicated is there? So why not make it one of your New Year resolutions to do your bit to encourage extra wildlife into your garden?

Read more about gardening for wildlife

For more information about the benefits of gardening for wildlife and how to do it, try out article here.
Find our advice on feeding the birds here. 
If you’d like to know more about wildflower turf, try this article.
If you’re thinking of installing a pond, find our advice here.