Spring and summer are amazing times of the year. Often the outside spaces of the home are springing back to life. We are no longer left with a wild and dull outdoor space. During the spring and summer, it is also the ideal time for us to attract wildlife into the garden and start enjoying helping them thrive. Today we are going to take a little look at some of the easy ways you can encourage wildlife into the garden this spring and summer.
Surefire Ways To Attract Wildlife To The Garden
Install feeders to Attract Wildlife to the Garden
The easiest way for us to attract wildlife to the garden is to give them a real reason to visit us. Animals are always looking for reliable food sources. If you often provide seeds, peanuts, and other foods for your animals, you will attract them often. Once an animal knows that they can get food from you, they will keep returning again and again. This can be a great thing for you. For birds, seed feeders and fat balls can be amazing. For squirrels, peanuts are a good option. You can also build a corn feeder for the squirrels. And for animals such as hedgehogs and mice, seeds, fruit, and cat food can be good.
Create homes for the wildlife
Animals all need somewhere to call home and during the course of the spring and summer, you can install birdhouses, bee houses and even ladybird houses to the garden to attract wildlife to the garden. Ladybird houses can be a great choice for anyone who grows their own fruit in the garden. Ladybirds will eat aphids who would otherwise target these plants. Make sure not to install birdhouses too close to the home because it is less likely that a bird will use it if it is close to you.
Build a pond
A pond is a perfect ecosystem for any garden and outdoor space. A diverse pond can be the most thriving wildlife space you have in your whole garden. Animals such as water snails, frogs, toads, newts, dragonflies, fish and more will love the space and make a home in your pond.
Start off by installing Tsurumi submersible pumps to keep the water nice and clean. This will help to maintain the quality of the water to help your wildlife thrive. If you can see if you can get some frogspawn from a friend or family member. This is a great way to kick start the pond and may attract wildlife to the garden beside the normal pond animals too!
Plant flowers
Bees and butterflies are both essential animals for our ecosystem and a simple way to attract them is through flowers. Seed mixes such as cottage flowers are great for this and they are super low fuss too! Planting a field of wildflowers is a great way to attract wildlife to the garden! Many birds will come and take the seeds in the fall.
Give a helping hand
Some of the animals which might want to visit our garden this year may struggle with accessing the space or escaping from it. For example, hedgehogs are small creatures who might find themselves stuck in our garden and unable to climb bushes to get out. This is why it is always a good idea for us to leave a small gap at the bottom of one of our fence panels. This provides the ideal path for a hedgehog to get in and out of the garden.
A pile of fallen logs or a small hill of leaves can provide places for different creatures to live and hide also. When you attract wildlife to your garden, sometimes you want that wildlife to stay and this is a great way of doing so.
Final Thoughts on Surefire Ways to Attract Wildlife to the Garden
As you can see there are numerous ways to attract wildlife to the garden on your homestead! By following the suggestions above you give plenty of reasons to have continuous visits from the local wildlife. And who knows, some may even make your garden the place they choose to stay and live!
Love this! We had a small pond at our old house and used to have so many critters, frogs and snakes and even a turtle and salamander. Since moving, we don’t have the pond anymore and I miss it terribly. Hoping to eventually put a new one in, just have to figure out where to put it.
PS-I saw your post on the Simple Homestead Blog Hop when I linked a couple of mine. 🙂
Having a pond brings so much wildlife! We have a few ponds around our homestead and love to see all the frogs and butterflies and dragonflies that frequently visit it! Thanks for stopping by!
Hi Annie:) Wendie and I were out all weekend planting not only the garden, but perennial flowers around the property. Sunflowers, poppies, lilac and assorted seed packets all found their way into the soil. The plan is to have a constant flowering stage for the bees to draw nectar from, and not being able to accurately predict how each summer’s dearth will occur, the more we have, the better protections our bees have of finding forage. Cheers!
Oh my goodness what a wonderful garden that will be and the pollinators will love it!!!
I have a everything but the pond 🙂
Thank you so much for the great tips and for sharing with us on the Homestead Blog Hop. I hope we see more this Wednesday.
These are some wonderful ideas! Thanks so much for sharing them!
Feel free to share at My Corner of the World
Will do! Thanks for sharing!