There are many competing interests in a garden. Planting, rotations, clearing weeds, dealing with pests, trying to be organic, improving the soil, and so on.
One of our interests is the wildlife and, with less hacking-back the weeds and improving the soil to do this year we’ve been able to spend some time thinking about how to attract wildlife into the garden.
There are many good reasons for this. Birds, small mammals and reptiles eat pests, bees polinate, worms break up the earth. Our little patch of earth is a complex ecosystem and we really want to see it teeming with life!
We’d ripped up some patches of long grass and weeds (shown in their early stages, above) and in the process of clearing it we quickly realised that this ground cover was the hiding place of many a frog!
Now, we LIKE frogs, so we decided to make some new habitat for our beloved amphibian friends. Inspired by the BBC’s “Wild About Gardens” programme (“If there’s one feature in the garden guaranteed to attract wildlife with astonishing speed, it’s a pond”), one hot day I made my mind up that I was going to dig us a water feature.
Not bad for an afternoon’s work!
With this and the new bedding system, and the crops all nicely rotated, it was feeling like quite a different place! We then got a bit carried away and moved the compost bins to make room for some raspberry canes too.
We even re-used some edging to give it a nice curved corner.
Yes, there was something nice about tidying up, moving around and having a bit of a redesign!