Home to Buy or Let

by | Sep 26, 2018 | Wildlife

With the housing market on the up and confidence increasing in 2018 it has never been a better time to look at building a home or to let out some space in your back garden.

What on earth are you talking about?? I am not building a house in my back garden I don’t have enough room. The cold and damp weather must have surely gone to my head!

Well as we move into what I believe to be one of our most exciting times of year. Yes it’s nearly spring. Our gardens and green spaces start to come to life and throughout Stockport and the Four Heatons we can start to look at what we can do for our local inhabitants. Most of whom have been hidden away over the winter period and are now starting to peer out and wonder if now is a good time to make a welcome appearance.

If you have been feeding the birds you will have had a constant stream of visitors into your gardens. The weather has been particularly mild so as we move through February and Valentine’s Day has been and gone, thoughts turn to love. I refer of course to the collard doves who are getting very amorous and the squirrels chasing each other around the cherry tree at the bottom of my garden.

It will soon be time for them and the blue tits, blackbirds and robins to start looking for a place to raise their families and this is where you can help.

To quote a well-known saying – ‘Build it and they will come!’

For the birds, why not put up a bird box. As long as its position is 1.2m high (out of a cat’s reach) or 6ft for those of us who never fully embraced decimalisation. If it is in a sheltered position and not facing the hot midday sun you will be fine. You can build one really easily out of scraps of wood from the shed or buy them relatively cheaply.

You can keep it very simple and most wildlife will thank you for it. Just provide access to your compost heap or under your garden shed and you will help out our prickly friends the hedgehogs.

You can leave upturned clay pots out of the way on soft or sandy soil and you will help frogs and toads take shelter. In fact, just delaying tidying your beds and borders until late March will help all manner of overwintering insects.

You can help out these less obvious garden friends in other ways. How about a bug hotel for the architects amongst you, a log pile maybe? Or even just some twigs tied together in a sheltered spot out of the rain. It doesn’t really matter.