Wildlife

Every garden should be a wildlife haven. It is not difficult to provide a few basics to encourage wildlife to use your green space no matter how small. If you want to encourage wildlife into your garden one of the most important things to do is not to use any chemicals. Pesticides and herbicides will kill all sorts of bugs including ones like ladybirds that you want to encourage into your garden to eat the ones that may be doing damage to your plants. If you poison the bugs then you poison the birds and small mammals to and so one up the food chain.

Here are some fascinating facts about why you should be encouraging wildlife into your garden:
• Over it’s life time a ladybird may eat as many as 5000 aphids
• A pipistrelle bat can catch over 3000 midges in one night
• Not all slugs eat your garden plants. The leopard slug (Limax maximus) is a carnivore and eats other slugs
• Slugs and snails can live up to four years
• One blue tit chick will eat 100 caterpillars in a day
• A hedgehog will eat 100 invertebrates including slugs and snails in one night

To encourage wildlife into your garden you need to provide food, water and shelter.

© Murtagh’s Meadow

5 thoughts on “Wildlife”

    1. Murtagh's Meadow Post author

      Thank you Lori. You’ve put a seed in my head to maybe do a longer post on this, because you are right it is a very important message.

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    1. Murtagh's Meadow Post author

      Ahh but imagine all the butterflies you’d have if all those caterpillars survived being eaten – a large white may lay up to 600 eggs:)

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