This summer, we put a call out for homeowners to come forward who were up for the challenge of helping wildlife in their gardens. Over four blogs, I’ll be sharing the ‘behind-the-scenes’ story of the garden mini-makeover videos we made.
What the homeowners didn’t have were massive budgets, a dozen burly workers and oodles of time, like you see on the telly.
Instead, they were asked to spend around £250, and had just one day to make some improvements, with just a little bit of help from me. We wanted to show the reality of what almost anyone can do on a limited budget and with only a bit of time to spare.
Today, a new-build garden in Bedfordshire with a sticky issue! See the video here. Photos by WildSide Productions.
Ben and Erin live in Bedfordshire with their two children, five-year old Logan and one-year old Daisy.
As is often the case on a new housing estate, their garden is a blank canvas – small, surrounded by bare fences, with just a patio and an area of grass.
At our online ‘consultation’, Ben and Erin explained that they wanted an injection of colourful flowers, in a simple garden design which was easy to manage and which left plenty of space for socialising and for the kids’ to play (including the compulsory trampoline!)
They also wanted a pond, knowing what a magnet it is for wildlife. Many families with children are nervous about ponds because of the risks, but those risks can be managed, just as with all the other day-to-day dangers that kids face. This pond would therefore include a short fence to keep Daisy safe while she learns about water.
As I recommend for all gardens, we drew up a plan, just a simple diagram of what was to go where. It doesn’t need any sophisticated garden design software – a pencil sketch is fine. This drawing I made by just drawing coloured shapes in Microsoft Word using a mouse over the original photo of Ben's garden.
Top tip: For anyone with a blank canvas like this, getting started can seem daunting. So I've penned a simple guide here for how to plan out a space from scratch with wildlife in mind.
So, our one-day task was to dig a small pond, plant some flower beds, put in some trellis and climbing plants to cloak the fences, add a birdbox and solitary bee hotel, and plant a fruit tree. Erin was especially keen on the latter, something with attractive blossom and then ‘berries’ in autumn.
Mini-makeover day was on one of the hottest days of 2021. With the sun reflecting off the brick walls, you can probably make out in the video our slightly sweaty state and some huffing and puffing in the heat. (Hence my ridiculous hat - style goes out the window when your first priority is shade!)
Our exertion was exacerbated because of the state of the soil. Ben and Erin had told me the ground was clayey, but it turned out to be pure clay, the type you could make decent pots out of! The lawn had been laid by a company that had put down a layer of topsoil first, but it was wafer-thin and of little use in reducing the impacts of the clay.
Top tip: To improve very clayey soil takes time, effort and a bit of cash. You will need to buy several bulk loads of compost and grit to open up the soil structure and make it less likely to become a quagmire in winter and bake hard in summer. The alternative is to accept the conditions and grow plants that can cope.
We started with the DIY – putting in trellis to support the climbing plants. They are a great way of hiding the ‘living in a box’ effect of high fencing. Just be sure that the fencing is robust enough to carry the extra weight. We used wooden battens to hold the trellis a couple of centimetres away from the fence, which will allow the climbers to wind their way upwards.
It took Ben and I just 40 minutes to dig the pond, despite the tropical temperatures and the gloopy clay. I know you often hear that a washing-up sunk in the ground is a good starting point for a pond, but they only hold about 10 litres of water, whereas our quick-dig pond will hold maybe 200 litres. That’s 20 times the volume, and 20 times more home for pondlife.
The pond was organic in shape – gentle curves, with shelves to put pond plants on and a shallow sloping beach for wildlife to get in, and out.
We lined the hole with sand and pond underlay to stop any builder’s rubber piercing the liner, and then a ‘rubber’ liner to hold the water. Gravel then hides most of the liner, and the pond plants in their recycled-plastic aquatic baskets can be sunk into the gravel.
Top tip: A pond always looks rather stark to start with. There is also a high chance that, in the first couple of summers, you will get a flush of algae, either a green soup or stringy gloop called blanket weed. Give a pond time and include plenty of pond plants and aquatic weed and it will normally sort itself out. Make sure you use an aquatic compost for the pond plants, which is low in nutrients and so won’t promote the algae growth in the pond.
We then got onto planting. I had chosen a range of perennial plants that are all known to have value for wildlife but are all easy to grow and will give the colour that Erin wants. They will come up year after year, bulking up as they do so to fill the borders.
I had bought ‘threes’ of most of the plants, which allows you to either group them together for more impact, or to dot them through the border and allow the eye to see repeat dots of colour. All were from a peat-free nursery, and in recycled plastic pots.
Our tree was Malus ‘Laura’ (below), which is one of a great variety of small-growing crab apples suitable for small gardens.
We added a dressing of bark chippings will not only help suppress any weeds (and reduce work) but will also gently rot down and help improve that claggy soil.
Finally, Ben put up the birdbox onto a north-facing fence (they should face somewhere between north and east) and a bee hotel pointing south in a sunny position and right next to nectar- and pollen-rich flowers.
Top tip: For a really simple bee hotel, get an old log and drill a number of holes in it as deep as you can, varying the drill bit between about 2mm and 10mm diameter.
Ben and Erin have already seen damselflies at the pond and bees and butterflies pausing in the garden. The photo below was six weeks after mini-makeover day, and you can see the plant growth already starting to soften the appearance of the pond. Ben and Erin had also added some logs around the pond, and a pine border edging strip.
Next year, the perennial plants should really begin to bulk up, the climbers will start to spread, and the garden should feel ever more lush – and that’s when the wildlife and family should really begin to reap the benefits.
Plant choices
Flowers:
Pond plants:
Climbers:
Tree: Crab Apple Malus Laura
Budget £270
If you want to drop by my RSPB wildlife gardening blog, it is updated every Friday, and I'd love to see you there - www.rspb.org.uk/community/blogs/hfw