Our headline Giving Nature a Home activity this month is all about getting Hedgehogs into tiptop condition, through giving them some little handouts to supplement their diet.

And, boy, do they need it, given the calamitous declines they have been going through. The latest estimate is that there are less than a million left (less than one for every 60 of us humans), although getting an accurate count is difficult. My…

Call me cheapskate, but I love those gardening activities that involve very little effort or cost for maximum reward.

And right up there in the list is growing annual flowers. For the cost of a couple of packs of seeds and the effort of a bit of digging and raking, you can transform relatively large areas like a floral version of Jackson Pollock's colourful sploshes.

This year, I have been trying out some different…

Having put in my new pond at the tail end of last year, it was always going to be interesting to see what wildlife turned up to use it.

I've had my Grey Wagtails and bathing Sparrowhawks and tadpoling Little Egret; the Frogs and Smooth Newts have bred like wildfire; the Whirligig Beetles are now in a spinning flock 30 strong.

But what of dragonflies and damselflies? The three small ponds I inherited are all too…

So here it is, the Big One, the month when - on a sunny day - there is an audible hum throughout the wildlife-friendly garden. Hoverflies hang in the air with precision, bumblebees mosey around on their endless mission, and everywhere has turned into a bustling insect metropolis.

Many hoverflies are wasp mimics, but note the large eyes and funny little antennae on the front of its face, proving that this is definitely…

If there is one thing you can do in a garden that is guaranteed to bring in wildlife and amaze and enthrall, it is creating a pond.

A washing-up bowl pond is a great start, and hopefully you saw the RSPB TV advert last year with the little boy with the frog in his washing-up bowl.

What is clear, however, is that while a tiny pond like that may indeed host a web-footed friend or two, it is when you graduate to what I…

I'm blogging early because I'm hitting the M40 up to the NEC for BBC Gardeners World Live - and we hope we'll see lots of you there.

It's on from Thursday to Sunday, and as usual the RSPB Events Team with their amazing volunteers have unleashed their creative juices on an RSPB Feature Garden in the main hall.

I've just been sent a sneak preview, and it looks like April and her team has created a Wheelbarrow…

This week we launched new webpages which we hope will become your one-stop-shop for giving nature a home in your garden.

Really importantly, it is also the place to tick off all the things you have ALREADY done so we can chart the progress of a nation pulling together.

And because this particular email goes out to the stalwarts, I'd love it if you would go in, tick off everything you have done, share a few photos on…

I wrote 600 words in the last blog. I'm aiming for 200 today. Just a dip-in-and-out nibble of wildlife gardening' a bloglet.

The first is an unashamed brag. Look what visited my pond this week.

Ok, so some of my tadpoles copped it, but there are still hundreds and hundreds of them.Amazing to think that Little Egrets didn't breed in the UK until 1996. Now, 20 years on, they are doing so well. And, as many of…

June is when you really begin to get a sense of whether your efforts to give nature a home are paying off. Do you have a garden bouncing with baby birds? Is there a hum of insects around your flowering shrubs and flower beds? Is your pond alive with tadpoles turning into froglets, and is the surface skimming with pond skaters above and backswimmers below.

June is the peak season for many of our damselfly species - those…

Didn’t Mother Nature have a moment of genius when she created butterflies? What a brilliant idea to put flat, tissue paper wings in glorious, colourful symmetry onto little cigar-shaped bodies and let them take flight. They seem to encapsulate natural beauty and grace.

So I bet you wouldn’t mind seeing lots more butterflies in your garden (perhaps with the exception of ‘cabbage whites’!)

Most…

One of the wonderful things about putting in a new pond is watching to see which creatures come and set up home there.

My new pond was filled last December, and as expected it sat quietly for the first few months, apart from the stream of birds that quickly took to their new deluxe bath.

Now, with temperatures rising, it is prime time for smaller creatures to begin to arrive, and a new pond is like a red carpet waiting…

At the end of March, I was fortunate enough to spend a week in the Algarve, my first ever trip to Portugal.

Just a short walk from my hotel I was able to enjoy wild Flamingoes...

and gorgeous birds we almost never see in this country such as Little Bitterns... (although they have been starting to colonise the Somerset Levels in recent years, where the RSPB has some brilliant nature reserves)

But one of the things…

Whether I have my wildlife hat on or my gardening one, May brings with a tremendous sense of expectation.

Whether it be migrant birds arriving back in their droves from Africa, the hum of insects or the unfurling of a billion leaves, we're now hurtling at full steam towards summer, with so much to do and enjoy.

I say this knowing that we're only slowly emerging from the grip of these northerly winds that have held…

I love those things you can do in the garden to help wildlife that you might never have thought of and yet turn out to be really simple and fun.

And here's one of them. It's a brilliant way to help reptiles thermoregulate...

Or to put it another way, it's something to help your wildlife can warm up!

The best materials to use for your Wildlife Sunbed are called Onduline (above) or Coroline - they're the…

One of the big questions in how to make your garden more wildlife-friendly is which plants should you grow.

There are plenty of lists out there, but rarely is there much evidence about where that advice comes from. So just how accurate is it?

Even in my RSPB Gardening for Wildlife book, I published a list of 400 plants to try, but they were based on just one man's observations - mine!

So I've worked with…

In response to my blogs about making my new pond (here and here), a question came in from Sue S as to what plants will go in it.

Now is a good time to get new pond plants...but when the pond was filled in December I couldn't resist buying some plug plants there and then.

So they've had three months or so to bed themselves in and grow a little during any warmish spells, and here they are so far:

Water-crowf…

If nature was a car, and March was like turning the engine over (and it not always starting first time), then April is 'handbrakes off' and we're on the move. Everything's arriving, hatching, growing.

And firmly in the 'growing' category now is, yes, the lawn.

Brace yourself: this year we'd love you to try something different, something quite bold. Can you let at least part of your lawn grow…

By 15 March this year, my neighbour with his bad knee had already cut his lawn twice. By the end of the year, I bet he will have done it 30 times.

Now I know that for some people a pristine bowling-green lawn is one of their biggest prides in life, but for most in our time-stretched society it is a downright chore.

There's no good scientific reason why a piece of grass needs to be chopped to within a millimetre of its…

In gardening for wildlife, as well as there being the right times to do things and the wrong times, there are some things which I think are worth doing even if you've missed the perfect slot.

So, having been bound up in pond creation for most of the last six months, one job of mine that has slipped past its prescribed timeframe has been putting up my new birdboxes.

Valentine's Day is said to be the prime time, so…

Last week I revealed the results of the first five months of slog last summer and autumn digging my new garden pond. Inspired by the amazing ponds I had seen in the gardens of Sue Camm and Ennis & Richard Chappell (as featured in Nature's Home), I had pledged to be as ambitious as I felt possible.

But could I create a pond that would buzz with wildlife?

By November 2015, the shape was created, with loads of…

It's now six months since I started work on my most ambitious pond ever. I've almost finished tidying the edging so I thought it was nigh time that I revealed progress so far.

Here's the first half of what I believe these days would be called 'a journey'!

1. This was the view from the house before work began. The Handkerchief Tree centre left was cut to a tall stump as it was threatening the house;…

After what looks to have been the warmest winter on record in the UK, the Met Office now seem pretty sure that we're going to have a colder than normal March. Brrrrrrrrr - I'm still in my long-johns!

My Magnolia buds have been thinking of opening for two weeks now, so they'll have to press the pause button, and the frogspawn that was laid in mid February may go into slow-motion development.

In this topsy…

Don't you love things that are quick and easy? And when it comes to wildlife gardening, beds of pollinator-friendly annuals must rank up there for creating the best return for your effort - what Richard Brown, whose garden featured in the latest Nature's Home, affectionately calls 'floral bolognese'.

I never used to be that taken with them - herbaceous perennials were what rocked my boat. But then Nigel…

I knew when I took on an acre of garden that I might get some visitors that were inconceivable in a smaller garden, but even so I didn't expect that it would be big enough to attract the attentions of this lovely boy.

Yes, over the last week I've been lucky enough to be visited by a male Kestrel. At first, we saw him a couple of times hovering over 'the meadow' (which is still a long way from becoming a meadow…

My new garden pond was filled just before Christmas, and if you'd asked me to predict which birds will visit it, top of my list would be this one, which arrived on the very first day and has been regular since.

The photograph was taken through my bedroom window, but nevertheless you can see that the name Grey Wagtail just doesn't do them justice. The 'Bright-yellow-ended Wagtail' might have been more fitting, perhaps…