Spring tidy - with wildlife in mind

Now is the time to finally tidy up the borders and get them ready for the new season. Several things trigger this activity:

spring equinox - the days are now 12 hours of light so the majority of plants will begin to grow
you can see new shoots on shrubs and new growth of perennials pushing up through the soil
the soil temperature is slowing rising - my soil thermometer says 14 degrees

If you want to tidy up in a wildlife friendly way here are my tips:

snap back all the old stems on your perennials to clear space and light for new growth. I put very fine stems on the compost heap but any put any course stems to one side or in a corner because there may be mini-beasts living within/amongst them. Hollow stems are particularly valuable for things to crawl inside and make great habitat for different mini-beasts as they slowly rot down.
don’t try and tidy back to bare soil - let leaves and small bits of stem material lay where they are and they will get dug in as you do any weeding and will add more nutrients for worms etc.
weed out the obvious nasties that you dont want in a border- particularly grass or other things that will self-seed and cause problem later but maybe to tolerant of the odd dandelion of bit of ‘dead-nettle’ - try and reclassify them as border plants?
look out for seedlings which can make new plants
consider how to protect any slug-prone plants without use of slug pellet ( you can only buy the organic ones but you may still have stocks of the old poisons). This is never easy but grit round the plants is the easiest to action. You can also try and making your garden attractive to hedgehogs to eat the slugs: make sure you have a couple of access points through your fences (25cm hole) and a few cat biscuits scattered strategically?
when you start cutting the grass, remember to raise the cut height so that you don’t remove daisy and dandelion flowers. That way you can keep it tidy but not interrupt any pollinator foot supply. I have tiny bees on my daisies every warm day now. (picture at top)

Here’s looking forward to lots of warm sunny days to come!

rosi22 March 20202 Comments