5 tips to encourage biodiversity
5 tips to encourage biodiversity
5 ways to increase biodiversity in your garden or outdoor space
By local charity Habitats & Heritage
1
Have an open body of water
The most important thing you could do to improve biodiversity in your outdoor space is to have an open body of water, either in buckets and shallow dishes, or by making a whole pond.
Why: Oftentimes, people associate ponds and waterbodies with frogs and newts, but these features support a great deal more than that. These aquatic habitats give a home to dragonflies, damselflies, and any animal that needs access to water like hedgehogs and birds! With one-third of ponds having disappeared in the last 50 years, this is crucial time to make more ponds. Moreover, as we’re experiencing drier seasons, it’s important that we create these refuges and paths that can connect travelling species to bigger bodies of water like rivers and lakes. This connectivity is so important in urban spaces where you can imagine how far our wildlife might need to travel to get to water.
How: In smaller spaces you can add water in a bucket and place rocks or sticks in to make the habitat a mixture of shallow and deep water, ideally, they have a sloping water gradient on the edge so smaller wildlife can get out. Creating this varying water depth also supports a wider diversity of life. Ensure you have something floating on the surface or a stick poking out to help any insect friends who are too tired to swim, this can save them from drowning. If you have the space, you could dig a pond. In these dug ponds it is important to plant native plants like reeds, lilies, around the pond so animals and insects can safely come in and around the pond. If you’re interested there are many resources online to create a wildlife friendly pond.
2
Choose pollinator-friendly, native plants and wildflowers
Why: Native plants like the familiar red clovers or oxeye daises have evolved alongside our native pollinators and critters. For example, the small blue, a butterfly currently in strong decline in some places in the UK, feeds solely on the plant kidney vetch as a caterpillar. These plants act as a food source of many species of wildlife that ornamental or non-natives cannot provide. Ornamental flowers often are bred for their aesthetics, which can mean they are unable to provide nectar to pollinators by being sterile or having too many petals or unfamiliar structures that bees and other pollinators have trouble navigating. Having a wide variety of native wildflowers is also important. To support UK native wildlife, we need to give them the plants they’ve evolved to use as food and habitat!
How: purchase native wildflower seeds and plug plants or responsibly collect seeds from local wildflowers, then plant them! Try buying from an organic seller as some garden centres might use pesticide coated seeds or sprays that can disorient, harm, or kill our small garden visitors. As for what to plant them in: they need nutrient poor soil where grass will struggle to grow, the lack of competition allowing them to come through. If your grass is aggressive, plant yellow-rattle seeds which parasitise the roots of grass, weakening them and eventually helping other wildflowers to grow. High nutrient can also ‘burn’ some seeds so use a potting mix of coco coir or turf mix, which are all nutrient poor. This is the reason you often find beautiful wildflowers on verges or rocky, well-draining brownfield sites. Early spring March-May is ideal for planting, but if you miss this window August-October works too.
3
Follow No Mow May
Why: leaving your grassy garden alone in the month of May is crucial because this is when wildflowers tend to bloom. This bloom provides nectar and food for a plethora of wildlife and the flower’s interaction with these pollinators leads to the flower forming seeds. Wildflower meadows are a habitat formed by traditional UK farming practices where farmers would let the fields grow to then eventually harvest it for hay in late summer. This practice created a land when nutrients were removed regularly only in late summer, allowing low-nutrient loving wildflowers to thrive.
How: Try to trim grass before May and then once between late June – August, leaving the cut material in place for a few days to allow the seeds to drop before removing it to maintain the low-nutrient level in the soil.
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4
Leave leaves alone
Similar to the one above, a very easy approach to help improve biodiversity in the autumn is to leave leaves alone.
Why: Leaf litter acts as a blanket for soil. It keeps the soil warm in the cold season and retains moisture, so it can save you spending money on mulch!. Don’t forget about the biodiversity in the soil from common microbes to the fungi networks you can’t see with your bare eyes. This setup is also ideal for garden critters and also other animals trying to escape the cold season — you might get a hedgehog under a pile of leaves if you’re lucky.
How: leave the leaves alone! Pile them and push them away from walkways instead of throwing them away in bin bags.
5
Avoid using pesticides and slug pellets
Why: Although, this might be a difficult ask when slugs have just decimated your spinach or newly planted crop, these chemicals are wildly harmful to biodiversity. Pesticides can often leach into waterways affecting river-health in your local area. Birds and hedgehogs, or any other animal which might eat poisoned slugs, can also suffer damages from the use of these chemicals, inadvertently killing a range of wildlife beyond your intended target. If you’ve followed some of the steps above, you might even find that the increased biodiversity and new presence of predators (like the ladybird) can act as natural pest control, reducing your need for pesticides.
How: use safer alternatives like crushed eggshells or coffee grounds to deter slugs. Companion planting or planting sacrificial species can also direct these hungry critters away from your precious vegetables. Many safer alternatives to specific ‘pest’ situations can be found online.
