The best way to attract and support wildlife in a home garden is to plant native plants, especially those that bloom throughout the season and those that serve as keystone native species.
But what else can you do to help wildlife in your yard?
This article will go over some tips other than planting that can have a big impact. You certainly can hang a birdfeeder or two and this will help our feathered friends, but focusing on the lower rungs of the food chain can have an even bigger impact on the larger food web.
You’ll also see these tips are contrary to most traditionally-established yard maintenance practices, so some education will be necessary to make more gardeners aware of their importance. Each and every person who starts to utilize them helps spread the message and drives more adoption.
Our Top Tips for Wildlife-Friendly Garden Practices
1) Leave the Leaves
“Leave the leaves” is a mantra that has been picking up some mainstream recognition lately, and it’s one of the most important things you can do to help benefit your garden and wildlife. First, as leaves decompose they add valuable organic matter to the soil and also help suppress weeds, so they act as a free and natural mulch and fertilizer. Also, a wide variety of creatures big and small utilize leaves for habitat; most notably moth and butterfly caterpillars who overwinter in the leaf layer, but also toads, turtles and even birds.
For those who keep areas of lawn alongside their native plant gardens, it is true that a thick layer of leaves spread over your turfgrass will lead to bare patches come spring, but you can chop your leaves up with a mulching mower and leave them in place (rather than bagging and sending them to a landfill which contributes to methane emissions as well as the carbon dioxide that comes from leaf blowing and transporting them).
You can also rake the leaves from your lawn into your garden beds to use as mulch for your native plants, and another good idea is to let a leaf pile decompose which will turn into leaf mulch, a valuable soil amendment.
Just remember that the more you can leave the leaves in place without disturbance, the safer it will be for caterpillars. So eliminating turfgrass directly around your trees and creating mulch circles is an excellent idea which will allow them to drop directly down into their overwintering site.
2) Keep Dropped Twigs and Branches (or Stumps and Snags)
Leaves aren’t the only thing that falls in your yard that can benefit your wildlife. Twigs, branches and larger logs are also hugely valuable for all types of creatures. The decaying wood attracts and provides food for beneficial insects and also fungi, which in turn serve as food for larger animals.
Keeping a brush pile of sticks and twigs can also “provide shelter for smaller animals, and protection from the elements (such as rain, snow, and sun) and predators.”
Depending on your yard, this can be adapted. If you have a large property, you can often just leave branches and sticks where they fall, but in a smaller suburban yard with neighbors looking on, you can dedicate one small area and place them to look somewhat intentional.
You can also think even bigger. Snags are standing dead or dying trees, which are also hugely valuable for wildlife in terms of shelter and cover and nesting sites and perches for birds. You can have a professional arborist turn a dead tree into a safe snag by reducing branches to stubs and cutting it down to a height where it won’t be a danger of falling on anything.
Or you could try a stumpery, “a collection of rotting wood stumps placed artfully in a disused, shady part of the garden to create fungus-filled habitat and provide housing materials for beneficial bees and butterflies” (Victory Gardens for Bees).
3) Delay Your Garden Cleanup
Our next tip extends the logic behind the first two, which is to leave in place the natural resources in your yard that can be a boon to wildlife of all sizes. Here we take it to the garden, and encourage you to resist “cleaning up” in the fall and leave stems and stalks in place through the winter and spring.
You may already be well aware that seedheads provide important winter food for birds, but our pollinator friends also benefit from the practice. Hollow plant sems are a favorite place for cavity-nesting insects to overwinter.
As the year turns to Spring and temperatures warm up, you can go ahead and cut the plants down, but leaving some of them intact creates perfect conditions for bees to find a place to lay their eggs. Instead of cutting to the ground, leave them at about 8 inches to a foot tall. Varying the size of the stem cuts “creates vertical nesting opportunities in a variety of diameters, suitable for insects of different body sizes” (Xerxes.org).
4) Retrain from Using Lawn Pesticides and Fertilizers
Refraining from using pesticides may be an obvious tip to most gardeners interested in helping wildlife, but it’s not always as widely known that fertilizers can be harmful too, and also what gardeners can do instead on those areas of their yard that are turfgrass to maintain them.
Pesticides of course kill all types of unintended targets in their path, including beneficial insects, and are also linked with major health conditions including cancer. The major risk with fertilizers is the runoff that seeps into streams and eventually lakes and create toxic algae blooms.
The basic theory with a natural approach is that avoiding chemicals creates healthier lawns in the long-run which actually require less maintenance. We’ve already mentioned how leaves can serve as mulch, and there are other natural and organic fertilizers that you can safely use on their lawn, such as compost, “seaweed for potassium, bone meal for phosphorous, and feather meal for nitrogen.” These fertilizers release nutrients much more slowly and also help soil microorganisms that benefit the soil. More healthy, thicker grass will suppress weeds much better on its own.
For lawns with undesirable weeds constantly creeping in, there are also natural alternatives to harsh chemical pesticides, such as vinegar, corn gluten meal, and essential oils (close, peppermint, etc.) Hand weeding, especially for annuals is another effective practice.
Killing the weed is also sometimes a symptom of a larger problem that can be solved safely, as in the case of crabgrass, which “can point to soil compaction, since it usually appears in highly trafficked areas, such as along driveways or walkways. Instead of zapping it with pesticides, get to the root of the problem by aerating the area where it’s growing.”
Picking the right grass seed for your area and site conditions from the start also helps greatly. Mowing higher and watering deeper and less frequently will make your lawn develop deeper roots which helps it stay healthier too.
5) Provide a Water Source
Our final wildlife-friendly tip is to ensure they have access to water on your property. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that animals want and need water, and providing one in your yard helps encourage more creatures to make it their home too.
Not all gardeners are blessed with enough space (and/or patience) to make a full-blown garden pond, but you can always add a birdbath or smaller item like a shallow dish or pot. You’ll certainly see birds splashing around but water sources also benefit amphibians like frogs and toads.
Other tips include placing your birdbath or other water item in the shade so the water stays cooler and fresh. You also want to avoid having the water be too deep for smaller birds; just about 2 inches deep in the middle is ideal.
Many gardeners who are thinking about adding a birdbath want to know how to avoid mosquitos since standing water can serve as a perfect breeding ground. In general, anything that keeps the water moving every 4-5 days will keep the larvae from developing, so that could include cleaning and replacing the water 1-2 times a week, or obtaining a water feature that has a fountain, pump or agitator/jiggler, many of which can be electric or solar powered.
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