How To Prepare Your Garden For Autumn To Support Wildlife

Autumn can be brutal on our gardens, with the unpredictable weather and extreme conditions it can be difficult to know how to prepare our gardens for the looming weather. Not only can our plants suffer, wildlife can also struggle during the blustery weather. Garden Wildlife Expert Lucy Taylor from Vine House Farm has explained Brits can prepare their gardens this autumn to support wildlife.

How to prepare your garden over autumn to support wildlife

Now is the time to consider how you can best prepare your garden during autumn for the benefit of wildlife in the much colder months which lie ahead.

Wherever you live in the UK, it’s unlikely that the summer this year has been a particularly good one. But we hopefully still have a few weeks for the sun to shine warmly on our gardens, and during this time it’s a great opportunity to plan some important tasks that can be carried out during autumn to help wildlife get through the winter. That said, one real benefit of a garden which very much has wildlife in mind, is that it can actually mean less work and less specific tasks compared to a neat-and-tidy and more traditional garden – which will become apparent in some of these examples.

Leave perennial plants to rot down rather than cutting back

Whilst you might want to trim longer stems off and those with dead flower heads during the autumn, leaving perennial plants in beds and pots to rot down naturally during the winter months has a great benefit to wildlife – and also helps enrich soil. The benefit to wildlife comes from the fact that the ground immediately below the rotting vegetation is at least partly protected from frost, with this allowing invertebrates such as insects to shelter or hibernate, which in turn become food for birds. Worms will also remain closer to the surface of the protected ground as they consume the rotting vegetation, which then also makes them food for birds, including Robins and Blackbirds.

Think of fallen leaves as a good thing

We’ve long had a bit of an obsession in the UK for clearing up fallen leaves in our gardens and then disposing of them, but attitudes are changing and it’s much better to see autumn leaves as something of a harvest. In the same way that invertebrates use the dead foliage of the perennial plants for protection and food, the same is true for leaves. So create piles of leaves in the corners of your garden, spread them onto borders, or, with the exceptions of paths and patios, just let them remain where they’ve fallen.

Create habitat piles

A habitat pile is typically a mound of branches, twigs, old plants, hedge trimmings and other garden materials, which can be any size and shape – though ideally aim to get some height in it and up to one metre or so. Habitat piles benefit wildlife in a number of ways, with an important one being somewhere to shelter or even hibernate for small mammals, including hedgehogs, plus amphibians like frogs and toads. Insects and spiders will also hide within the structure, with these then becoming food for small songbirds and notably Wrens.

No better time to put up nest boxes

Along with ensuring that birds such as Blue tits have somewhere to nest come the early spring, putting up nest boxes now gives a number of different species somewhere to safely spend the long cold nights. Choosing the right types of nest boxes and knowing where to site them can be difficult if you don’t have the prior knowledge, but you’ll find plenty of advice and tutorial videos for the subject on the Vine House Farm Bird Foods website – plus lots more about how to attract birds and other wildlife to your garden.

Vine House Farm are suppliers of bird feed, and have over 50 years of experience in bird care. https://www.vinehousefarm.co.uk/