Establishing your own wildlife garden - Part 2. Implementation

In Part 1, I talked about the planning process and how critical it is at the start to put a lot of effort into the planing.

In this second part, I will share with you how I implemented the plan, and modified as I went.

I started with a large area of heavily overgrown and very fertile soil - not the best for wildflowers - poor soil is actually much better.

A concrete path, masses of blackberry bushes, brambles, roses, invasive shrubs a couple of small lawns, and four dry stone walls were all surplus to my plan.

It was a daunting task. Access to the area with a mechanical digger was going to be tricky to impossible so it was to be a labour of love, graft, blood, sweat, tears, and bad backs.

I started in the the late May after return from a trip to Mull and so the process began. A hour or so after work before supper, a few hours at weekends. Dig, pick axe through untold numbers of heavy roots. Lots of 'Round Up' down to kill the weeds.

Working systematically, I dug down a couple of foot, cleared roots and burned them off. As I worked from one side, I banked up the soil to create the topography that I was working my plan on, which gave me clearing space to work.

Now, would I have preferred to use a little Bobcat digger? Possibly, but it did mean that root clearance was far more efficient when done by hand. I know if I had used a mechanical digger, I would still be killing off stuff as we go into the fourth growing season. So the hard graft at the start was worth it.

It did mean that progress wasn't very fast, but I had until September until I needed to get seed down.

Large loads of Oak slab wood was delivered and edges were set down as shuttering.

In the area of my raised pond that would act as the feeder pond to the stony stream feeding the main pond, slab wood and posts were constructed to form a sort of terracing so I can build height quickly to overcome the natural slip angle of soil, thus avoiding subsidence.

Concrete paths were bashed using sledge hammers, and the rubble back filled in the raised pond area to save having to get rid of it, and avoid the need for additional soil.

Not wanting a level plot, but having contours meant I had to think carefully about how I distributed the soil to get the banks with the amount of earth available to use.

As the digging continued, progress at times felt impossibly slow, but after about six weeks, I had a couple of weeks of summer leave, and things accelerated.

On the areas I had prepared, weeds started to come up, so these were continually killed off. The local cats loved the fact that they had this massive litter tray that I had lovingly prepared for them....bastards!!

By the end of August, all the main prep was done, mounds and hills built, tree stumps embedded as feeder tables.

The final activity was to build the ponds. I put three in at the first pass. A reflection pool, purely for photographic purposes. Making a rocky mound, I set down some reinforcement mesh, and made a mix of hypertufa, comprising of cement, sand and peat to give it a rustic feel. It was tricky getting it dead level, and it took a number of fine tweaks subsequently with skims of cement.

The second pond was a separate small plastic pre-formed liner placed at the top of the garden near the pear tree. My thinking was to give wither frogs, toads or newts a separate place to go to get away from whatever because the dominant species if it need to.

The main pond was marked out with white sand trail to define the edges, and the digging began. The spoil was moved to create the mound for the final pod that I built a couple of years later to feed the stream to feed the main pond.

The main pond was essentially configured in two parts. The area by the path shelved from nothing to about 8 to 10 inches deep. This shallow area is a great area for birds to get in and bath. It is also very popular with the tadpoles as the water here heats up quickly in the sun.

The other half of the pond was built as a deep sump, about three feet deep. This is to give the overwintering amphibians, and damsel / dragon larva plenty of ice free water during the depths of winter.

Side shelves to a depth of about 1 foot were also made to provide for marginal planting.

The pond was lined with a heavy butyl rubber and the 'beach' was covered with slate stone to cover the rubber liner.

A trip to a local water garden centre resulted in the purchase of a number of native UK species.

With these placed, the pond was filled.

It was now the first week of September. Time to order the seeds.

In the third part of this series, I will take you through the planting and first year growing season. I will even get some pictures for you. I have been through my archives and have struggled to find any pics of the build process.

Martin

Establishing your own Wildlife Garden - Part 1. Planning

Just after the New Year, David Schenk asked if I would write an article on wildflower gardening. Apologies for being a bit slow David, but this is part 1 of a short series where I will write about my experiences of trying to set up and establish my garden.

I am NOT an expert by any means and would classify myself as a well intentioned novice. I will share my thought processes, my actions, what has worked well, what hasn't, my mistakes and some of the things I am pleased to have achieved.

So if this isn't your thing for the future, then look away now and look forward to some great images from Dave instead.

So where did it start for me? From the moment that I viewed this house almost five years ago this coming May.

The rear garden was quite large, certainly by modern house standards as my house is the same age as me - old!!

I knew that I wanted to make a large wildflower meadow so that I could attract birds, butterflies, insects and all sorts to photograph without having to get in the car.

So first step achieved. You need to want to do it, but make sure you know why and what you want to achieve.

Take a look at natural habitats and go to other gardens where you can and see what you like and what you dislike.

The next thing you need is a plan. I started scribbling on bits of paper, placing features such as ponds, waterfalls, feeder ponds, reflection pools, banks and seating areas on A3 graph paper.

There is so much available web resource - google is your friend to find examples of what you like and dislike

RSPB advice here, plus another link here, but best will be your own searches.

When you set out your plan, make sure you do it to scale, make sure you place the angle of sunrise and sunset so you know where to put features for optimum light.

I also had a couple of tree stumps as feeding perches so again, think about your backgrounds and the distance to those backgrounds so you can get them as diffused as possible.

I knew that I wanted to provide banking so I could tier the planting from low to high to make photographing butterflies and insects easily. The angle of the sun was important to the alignment of those banks and I sought to make them as south facing as possible.

I made some wrong decisions with my tree stump placing with one of the backgrounds so I will move that in the next month or so before the growing season starts in earnest.

I will share my plans with a series of photographs in subsequent blogs in this series.

As part of your planning process, it is worth thinking about the growing seasons so as well as a paper plan, you have a timed work plan.

I knew that I wanted to plant in the late Summer/early Autumn, so my programme worked backwards from that.

As another part of my planning, I made a planting plan.

Edges of the garden were to be planted with native hedgerow such as Blackthorn, Field Maple, Hazel, Holly, Dog Rose, Guelder Rose to give a mix of berry and fruit bearing oppportunities for birds and insects to feast on.

I also made the conscious decision that I would only plant with native UK wild species. I made a single exception and left an existing Buddleia in place as a useful shrub for the birds to use as cover, and for the butterflies to nectar from. Otherwise, everything else had to come out that wasn't native. Three existing fruit trees were also retained as again they provided a useful food source both for me, and the wildlife.

The rest of the areas were then mapped out with different types of wildflower conservation mix seeds.

I sourced these from Nickys Nursery based in Sussex. A good service, and exceptionally good value for money, an exceptionally wide range of mixes and I can recommend them.

I opted for a butterfly mix, in different heights for my areas of sunny disposition hedgerow, shady, woodland, pond and water edge amongst my choices.

I wish that I had spent a bit more time planning, although as I prepared the site, which was a long and arduous process, as it was all done by hand, it did enable me to fine tune on the way. So unless you plan to pay for someone else to do it, or you hire in expensive bits of kit then you can be a bit more flexible and let it evolve.

I found as I spent the time out there clearing the site, digging deep and preparing the elevations, I flexed my plans.

That will do for Part 1.

So to summarise.

1. Be clear on what you want to achieve.

2. Look at habitats and examples of what you want to replicate

3. Start planning by using an accurate scale drawing of the features you want

4. Make a planting plan

5. Plan your growing season, and work backwards

6. Give yourself plenty of contingency time - everything will take longer than you think.

7. Keep your plan flexible and let it evolve as you start the work.

In the next part, I will take you through the hard work of preparation and the pitfalls and stresses of the getting the groundwork done.

Martin