How to Help Wildlife in your Garden - September
As the summer comes to an end, there are lots of things you can do to help wildlife survive in the winter.
Provide Shelter
Providing shelter in your garden really makes a big difference to the wildlife in your garden.
Put twigs, small sticks at the back of your border. These provide excellent shelter for small mammals and invertebrates such as spiders, snails and beetles. It’s also tempting to tidy up your herbaceous borders but leaving plants can also provide much needed shelter for the winter. Stacked plant pots or pots on their side filled with sticks also provide homes for a wealth of little creatures!
In many ways, helping wildlife means that we perhaps aren’t quite as tidy as we have been in the past! For example, instead of picking up leaves just move them to a corner of the garden or under a hedge can provide a haven for hedgehogs and other small animals.
Compost heaps are perfect places for hedgehogs and queen bees to hibernate. If you have an open bin a piece of old carpet will keep it dry and warm. Avoid disturbing it to the end of April when all the hibernating creatures will have woken. If your compost bin has a lid, make sure creatures can get in and out.
Nesting Boxes
From September, it’s a good idea to clean out any nesting boxes. This means they will be ready for the Spring and also provide shelter for birds in the colder months.
Pruning
Back to tidying again – it’s very tempting when putting your garden to bed for the winter to cut back any bushes or shrubs. However, it’s always worth making sure you preserve anything with berries, rosehips or seed heads as they really do provide essential food for wildlife.
Feeding birds
Now is the time to make sure you do keep your bird feeders topped up. Consider higher fat foods to help migratory birds prepare for their journeys and to help younger birds get stronger in preparation for the winter.
Even though it’s colder and wetter, water is still important so make sure there’s a source of water for your garden birds.
Install a bat box
Many British bats roost in trees but a bat box could be a perfect place for a bat to hibernate. It needs to be dampproof without draughts and at least 4m off the ground. It should be in a sheltered spot but one that gets sun in the day. There are lots of instructions for building bat boxes on the internet such as this one from The Wildlife Trust: https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-build-bat-box