Gardens make up a staggering 1 million acres of land in the UK bringing a unique opportunity to create many different habitats for a range of our best-loved creatures. Wildlife gardens are many and varied in the Stour Valley, they may be found in isolated rural areas, villages and town centres. They provide interest and enjoyment to a wide range of people providing opportunities from individuals making small local improvements to larger scale community projects (for example school wildlife areas).

Goldfinches, green woodpeckers, voles, mice, bats, hedgehogs and smooth newts are all common visitors to wildlife gardens given the right conditions. A common misconception is that wildlife friendly gardens are almost certainly wild unkempt wildernesses. In fact, gardening for wildlife is probably the best option in the 21^st century as it meets two important demands of busy people as they are generally low maintenance and on the whole ‘tidy’! Wildlife gardening can include the whole family, most children experience their first encounter with wildlife as a result of visiting the local park or back garden and can soon identify a range of animals from croaking frogs in the spring to pipestrelle bats at the height of summer.

So sprucing up you garden for wildlife is easy and can start today! Leaving piles of dead and decaying leaves can provide hibernation sites for hedgehogs providing that they are left undisturbed. Hedgehogs emerge from hibernation to breed in April producing 4-6 young and are great to have around as they soon get busy eating slugs and other unwanted garden pests. The choice of plants in your garden will have a dramatic effect on the type of visitors you receive. Nectar rich plants such as teasel, marjoram and sunflowers will attract a range of colourful butterflies and insects. Creating a mini-meadow sown with wildflowers on infertile soils will soon attract mini-beasts to hunt for in the long grass! Caterpillars are a great way to educate and amuse kids. To attract caterpillars to the garden grow plants such as ladies smock, fushia and garlic mustard - and be nice to nettles, they are great for the caterpillars of tortoiseshell butterflies and ladybirds too! Berry producing shrubs such as guelder rose and hawthorn provide much needed sustenance to small mammals and birds especially during autumn. If you’ve an oak tree in your garden you’ll have more neighbours than you think as oaks attract a massive 400 species of invertebrates compared with the miserly 40 of the non-native sycamore.

Kitchen waste from the house may be stored out of sight and mixed together with woody and sappy garden waste in a compost bin. The compost when well rotted can be used on the garden to mulch hedges, fruit trees and as a soil conditioner, aiding water retention and slowly releasing a range of nutrients into the soil. Care with water use in the garden is easy too, using a water butt not only recycles an increasingly precious resource but it may help if there is a watermeter lurking somewhere in the vicinity of your property! If you’ve got a corner for a garden pond then the garden will be a haven for newts, dragonfly larvae and even the odd grass snake. All in all as long as the pond is free of fish and non-native water plants there’ll be all things aquatic waiting to be discovered.

Inspired to create a wildlife garden? Or does this all sound like the garden you already have? Either way there’s time to revisit your existing wildlife friendly garden or create one and enter your garden in this year’s Gardening for Wildlife awards for a chance for your work to be recognised. The KSCP are promoting this year’s scheme in Ashford and surrounding villages. The scheme is run by Kent Wildlife Trust, enquiries about entries should be directed to Ashford Borough Council.

If you are interested in finding out more about the award scheme, please contact Carole Clay at Ashford Borough Council for an entry form and information pack, preferably by email on carole.clay@ashford.gov.uk or if this is not possible, by phone on 01233 330473.

Kentish Stour Countryside Project
Sidelands Farm, Wye, Ashford, Kent TN25 5DQ
01233 813307
kentishstour@kent.gov.uk