Gardening.ie

WILDLIFE NEEDS SHELTER
A tidy garden may look smart, but where are all the friendly garden creepy crawlies going to snuggle down for the winter?



Leave some piles of leaves and logs in an out of the way place. Let thick hollow stems stand in the winter or collect them and tie in a bunch and hang in a sheltered spot.





Make a pile of dead leafy twigs. Don’t be too tidy. Ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies and many other garden creatures need as much help as possible to get through the cold, wet winters

LOG PILES



Wherever you live and whatever your garden is like it will have hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands, of invertebrates living in it – insects, spiders, millipedes, centipedes, and lots more. The vast majority of these life forms are microscopic and we’ll all live our lives without ever seeing them or knowing their names. But these tiny organisms form the basis of most other life in our gardens.

Log piles don’t need much space, and provide ideal homes for a wide range of invertebrates. Make a log pile in the corner of your garden with logs as large as you can manage. Don’t pinch logs from the countryside and woodlands where they will already be doing their good work. Instead get them from a fuel merchant or a farmer selling logs.

Stack them neatly, leaving a few access gaps for larger species of insect and invertebrates to crawl in to. Then forget about it - the habitat requirements of many of the species in rotten wood will not benefit from exposure to light and air.