Keep the wildlife happy over the winter

You have to feel sorry for the garden wildlife – the cold winter months are a harsh time for birds and animals, who may struggle to find food and water. Here are a few tips for keeping the birds and more happy over the colder seasons.

One of the best ways to keep your garden birds well fed is to put out fat balls for them in wire cages (not the plastic bags) You can make your own by melting ordinary suet into moulds – you can use things like a log with a hole drilled into it or even a coconut shell if you have one. Try making the balls from different recipes, too, so that you’ve got something for all the different birds. Finches like berries, tits like insect cakes and starlings will go mad for peanuts.

Add some seeds too – birds need these to help them get a balanced diet, and smaller birds also like to munch the seeds from sunflower heads if you have any. Fill a wire mesh feeder with nuts and/or seeds and place them around the garden. If there are no marauding cats around, you could also add some seeds to a wire mesh ground feeder; robins love them.

Thrushes and blackbirds will soon clear up any over-ripe apples, and like leftover fruit and raisins, so you can also add those to the ground feeder.

Looking after other creatures

Small animals can be overlooked in winter as they crawl into what they think are cosy places to hibernate. For this reason, always check compost heaps and bonfires for sheltering and hibernating animals, like hedgehogs, toads and frogs.

If your pond ices over, melt a hole in it so that wildlife can drink, and also get in and out of the water. The best way to do this is by sitting a saucepan filled with hot water on the ice to melt a hole, rather than simply tipping hot water onto it, hitting or cracking the ice which can create harmful shockwaves.

Put out a shallow container of water for birds and animals who need access to it.Leave herbaceous and hollow-stemmed plants unpruned until the winter months have passed, so that animals can shelter in them during the colder periods.

These tips should make sure that your garden is a welcoming safe haven for any wildlife that makes its way there this winter!

Hardy Winter Plants...

Cold weather can kill off even the toughest garden plants, as the cold causes the water in plant cells to freeze, damaging the cell wall. Even hardy plants and evergreens can be damaged by severe cold weather when soil becomes frozen. Plants die from lack of moisture too, when the ground freezes and they can’t take up water. Keep a close eye on your plants to avoid losing them to plummeting temperatures!

Autumn is a good time to plant flowers ready for spring, and some of our favourite plants will even produce a flower or two during the winter if it’s mild, and will give your garden a big burst of colour when spring arrives.

Try adding a few of these bedding plants in the next month or so, and wait for a bright and colourful spring...

1. Pansies
Pansy plants bloom longer than any other winter flowering bedding plant, so if you need a splash of colour in your flower beds, borders or hanging baskets, invest in some pretty winter-flowering pansies. Grow some in a sunny or partly shaded parts of the garden, and make sure you dead-head them regularly to keep them flowering.

2. Violas
These produce lots of little dainty flowers, and are just as versatile as pansies. Great for hanging baskets, some varieties even have a lovely fragrance.

3. Primroses
Modern varieties of primrose start flowering from mid-winter onwards, and they are available in a range of colours to brighten up your garden. Primroses work well in borders and bedding, and can also be added to window boxes for a bit of colour on a dull day.

4. Polyanthus
Polyanthus are colourful and long-lasting, which makes them superb winter bedding plants. They also suit baskets and boxes.

5. Wallflower
These smell gorgeous and look lovely in the garden, when they flower. Although traditional varieties tended to flower in spring, modern variations also have a floral display in autumn, which can last a while if carefully tended.

6. Stock
These are always popular in for winter, with their large, ruffled, fragrant floral spikes which appear from mid-spring through to mid-summer. During winter, they show a rosette of leaves which bursts into bloom in spring.

7.Forget-me-not
A great partner to spring bulbs, Forget-me-nots are traditionally blue, but also look gorgeous in pink and white, self-seeding to give the garden an almost permanent display.

8. Cyclamen coum
A true winter-flowering plant, Cyclamen coum is a colourful addition to your garden even during the cold January and February weather. Cyclamen has dainty flowers and marbled leaves, and the blooms will inject a welcome splash of pink into your winter garden.

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What to do in October

October is likely to be your last chance to get any real work done in the garden before the weather takes the decision out of your hands. It should still be reasonably warm unless we get hit with a really early winter, so get the gardening gloves out and get the last minute pre-winter jobs done.

Some plants don’t survive cold days and even colder nights, so if you have any delicate house plants outside that have been getting the benefit of late summer sunshine, bring them indoors now and avoid a surprise frost ruining them.

 

If you have a greenhouse, delicate plants will be fine in there, if not, take them indoors or get them under shelter if possible. You might want to acclimatise them slowly; if it’s warm you can leave half-hardy perennials until the end of October, but in frost-prone areas it’s best to bring them under cover, or into the shelter of the building, early in the month.

Give the perennials their last cut of the year; trim everything back ready for spring. Prune plants like climbing roses right back and get shrubs looking neat and tidy.

Give the lawn its last cut before winter, and tidy up leaves and foliage that have built up in early autumn. Raking the leaves up prevents them from browning the grass, as well as generally making the garden look tidy! You can save some of the leaves for mulch if you like, which you can put over borders to help keep soil from getting too cold. As a finishing touch, you could also give your lawns a feed; this can help to to stimulate root growth and is well worth it for on lawns that get a lot of wear over the spring and summer.

Keep clearing the leaves up all through the winter so that you keep the lawn looking healthy. Just add them to your mulch collection and they’ll serve a useful purpose instead of cluttering up the garden.

Get planting done ready for next year; anything that you plant at this time of year will hopefully benefit from time over the winter to take root. Evergreens can dry out if you plant them in exposed areas over the winter though, but if you’re happy to carry on watering them even when it’s cold outside, it’s also worth planting those.