You might remember last year we asked for your support to help the Edinburgh RSPB Phoenix Group raise enough money to create their wildlife garden. The group are back with this brilliant update on where that money has gone and all the impressive work they’ve carried out with it to help give nature a home.
Making Space for Nature – Progress in the Edinburgh Phoenix Group Wildlife Garden
Last year the Edinburgh RSPB Phoenix Group secured over £1000 worth of funding from a successful crowd funding campaign in association with YIMBY (Justgiving), and a £250 grant from Keep Scotland Beautiful. The vast majority of this money has now been spent on materials like wood, paving materials, tools and compost, as well as plants in the form of bulbs, young plants and seeds. We soon made good progress, building two ponds, bird boxes and a pyramid for climbing plants.
After a few months of doing other activities like the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch, the Phoenix group teamed up with another wildlife explorer’s group - the Edinburgh Hobbits (Hermitage of Braid Birders in Training) - for an early spring meeting to see how even more progress could be made.
The groups worked together to build a path, raised beds, bat boxes and plant out native wildlife friendly plants to suit different conditions of shade, moisture and soil type such as heather, daffodils, ferns and broom.The Hobbits (Aged 6-11) also worked with their group leaders to make a deadwood pile to help insulate a hedgehog house and provide a habitat for fungi and invertebrates to thrive.
Others worked together to build planting boxes which can be planted with different species throughout the year. These were filled with peat free compost and planted with daffodil bulbs to provide colour and food for pollinators throughout early spring.
Phoenix and hobbits members also worked together to create a bat box to be erected on one of the mature trees next to the garden. This will provide a summer roosting space for Common and Soprano Pippistrelle bats. We’ll be following all of this up with the construction of a much larger box with internal chambers to allow for hibernation and breeding.
Everyone got stuck in, clearly not afraid of the mud, to put in place edging for the path around the woodland end of the garden which will be planted out to create a mosaic of mini habitats for wildlife providing food and shelter.
If you would like to join one of these groups, or learn more about the brilliant work they do, then please contact ed.rspb.phoenix@gmail.com or rspbhobbits@gmail.com
To read the previous blog from the Edinburgh RSPB Phoenix Group on their wildlife garden click here.