Capability Charlotte’s Gardening Calendar - October
October is a fantastic time to prepare your garden for wildlife, ensuring it provides food, shelter, and nesting opportunities throughout the colder months. Here are some essential wildlife-friendly gardening tasks in October:
Leave the Leaves
Resist the urge to clear fallen leaves and plant debris. Piles of leaves and logs provide shelter for hedgehogs, frogs, and overwintering insects such as ladybirds and beetles. Create a leaf pile in a quiet corner to attract wildlife.
Plant late-flowering species
October is ideal for planting late-flowering perennials like sedum, asters, and heather, which can provide nectar for pollinators like bees and butterflies on warmer autumn days.
Feed the birds
As natural food sources dwindle, ensure your bird feeders are stocked with high-energy seeds and fat balls. Clean and fill feeders regularly to prevent disease, offer fresh water for drinking and bathing.
Create habitats
Consider making a bug hotel from paper straws, pinecones, bricks and twigs. It will provide overwintering shelter for beneficial insects, including solitary bees. Leave seed heads on plants like sunflowers and teasels, which attract birds and insects.
Set up shelters
Install bird boxes and bat boxes, giving them time to settle before winter. Hedgehog houses can also provide much-needed sanctuary for these endangered creatures. If your garden is surrounded by a fence make sure there is a hedgehog hole in them.
Mulch, Mulch Mulch!
Lastly, mulch borders to enrich soil and keep plant roots warm. Some of the new soil improvers made from bio-digestors have a high salinity, so may have the added bonus of deterring slugs.
By making these simple adjustments, you can turn your garden into a wildlife haven during the autumn months.