Essential gardening tasks for spring
If you’ve already started to create a bird and wildlife-friendly garden, the arrival of spring is when it really starts to pay off
With luck, your nestboxes will be occupied, and the insects that you’ve provided habitat for will be a vital source of food for the young birds raised in them. You’ll remember to keep your feeders and bird baths topped up throughout the spring and summer (this allows adult birds to spend more of their time finding food for the youngsters), and you can sit back and reflect on a job well done. Well, you deserve to relax, but May through to October is still a busy time for the wildlife gardener. Keep on top of the tasks below, and your garden will be a haven for wildlife throughout the year.
This is a busy month for any gardener, with frosts well and truly gone, and warm daytime temperatures. • Prepare your beds for planting flowers, shrubs and vegetables by digging them over, weeding and adding compost if necessary. This will have side benefits for garden birds that eat worms, as they’ll be easier to find. Robins are the best example, of course – their behaviour around gardeners actually mimics what they would do with Wild Boar as the large mammals turn over earth. • Try planting perennial flowers, which return year after year, to add colour and to attract insects. If you haven’t planted wild flower seed (some species need to be sown as early as the previous October), don’t worry – pot-grown wild flowers are available at many garden centres. Make sure you water them in well, and keep them moist. • Prune springflowering shrubs such as Forsythia after they have flowered. • Plant herbs, herbaceous plants, and container-grown shrubs, and make up your hanging baskets. • Sow salad vegetables, cabbages, etc., outdoors. If you have to take measures to prevent birds from eating too many (Woodpigeons can be very fond of peas, for example), don’t use netting that the birds could get their feet tangled in – 4cm netting should be fine, stretched taut, and you can also hang up old CDS to act as bird-scarers (the artist is irrelevant, of course, but we found Cliff Richard’s do the trick).