Making a Home for Nature

October 12, 2021

It's been a long time since I updated my blog! So here's the start of a few updates that I'll be making over the coming months. This one is a bit of a different post from me, but something very important...

We moved house in January 2021 and one of the first things I wanted to do was to convert an area of the garden to a wildlife haven, complete with pond. The designated area was used by the previous owner as a dumping ground; covered in plastic and dead plants. It took a few days to plan, measure and dig the pond, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. Just goes to show if you build the environment the animals will find it...

The end result...

We're lucky to have at least one of these critters visit the garden every night...

The beginning... This is how the area of the garden looked before we started...

Step one was to remove all of this, including the pergola...

The next step was to dig the pond. I started digging over Easter weekend and it took a couple of days to dig it completely. The final measurement was 4m long, 2m wide and 1m deep at the deepest point, making sure there were shelves for plants and shallow areas for wildlife to climb in and out...

To make sure the pond liner didn't get any cuts or tears, we first lined the area with soft sand...

Followed by an underlay (not visible here but it's under the liner)...

And then an overlay over the liner...

This was a very exciting day! Filling the pond and cutting back the liner to make it look more like a 'pond'. There was still a long way to go...

The next stage was the surrounding area. The soil was heavy clay mixed with gravel, so not the best planting conditions. So we cleared as much of the gravel away as possible, churned up the clay and added a huge amount of compost. We also started adding rocks to the area to make the edge of the pond more natural, ensuring the rocks sloped into the water in the shallow areas (so wildlife could easily climb in and out)...

Then came the fun part, adding seeds for plants that would benefit insects as well as arranging rocks in a rockery...

Further additions to the pond were a rock pile and log pile, key areas for wildlife to hide...

It was brilliant watching the plants grow in and around the pond, and seeing how the wildlife took to the area...

In the space of a few months we saw a myriad of different insects take to the pond, and I'm hoping they will encourage other animals like newts to eventually make it a home. We now have one frog which seems to be a permanent resident (hopefully he/she will encourage others to join!). We have a large variety of bird species that come to the feeders every day, my particular favourites being the woodpeckers and Goldfinches. We even get fairly regular visits from a Sparrowhawk (I'm still to get a decent photo of it). Finally my favourite species that now calls the garden home is our resident hedgehog. I consider us very lucky to see a once common, now rare, species every night, and I'm doing all I can to help them, including leaving a little bit of food out every night, and installing a 'hedgehog house' complete with wireless camera so I can watch what goes on without disturbing them.

Thanks as always for taking a look. I hope this encourages others to create a 'wildlife' area in their garden. While a pond is one of the best ways to support wildlife, it isn't necessary. Just a supply of food and water will bring animals in. I thoroughly enjoy all the animals we now have visiting our garden, and is the best thing we've done to the new house!