If you have seen the 1989 film ‘Field of Dreams’ by Kevin Costner, you’ll know that the most famous line in the film was ‘If you Build it, he will come’. It’s a great film based on baseball, check it out if you haven’t seen it.
The saying ‘If you Build it, they will come’ fits in very well with what happens to wildlife coming into an area with nothing there to start with.
This is what our back garden looked like when we moved in 2 years ago.
We live on a new build site (and it still is a building site) but we didn’t opt in for the turf.
Anyone who has a new build knows that the soil is in a very poor condition with water logging in places. Our new build garden soil type is Clay, which makes the water logging worse, it was like a mud bath everywhere.
Then in Summer, Clay soil is dry, like concrete, cracks everywhere and un-workable in its current state. It was a ‘no brainer’ to put raised beds into so we could regulate our soil in them.
As with new house builds, the garden had some rubble left in it, the soil had also been compacted by all the heavy machinery that had moved around on it and it hadn’t seen a rotavator for ages.
We left our mud bath for a while whilst we settled in (the only thing we did install was the washing line) and then we decided to get a landscaping company to put in our garden design. It wasn’t cheap but they did it properly. I.e rotavated, dug in top soil and nutrient mix and laid a substrate for the raised beds, greenhouse & shed concrete bases and patio.
Raised Beds, lawn, shed and greenhouse base down and new patio happened next.
As you can see, as soon as the raised beds were in. I bought vegetable plants and they were planted.
The greenhouse is from The Greenhouse People is 6 X 6 with horticultural glass and is highly recommended. It was constructed by my husband and I a bit later in the year so it was a bit redundant until the next year.
Last year we also sowed some wild flower seeds in a skinny flower border which definitely brought the wildlife in and was a much needed food source for insects and bees so early in the year.
NOW – Two years later – Year 2024
Our garden is now growing into a little wildlife haven, we have fruit trees and fruit vines which have been excellent for the honey, solitary and bumble bees.
The raised vegetable beds encourage hoverflies, insects, bugs, wood louse, beetles and more.
We have seen so much wildlife like dragonflies, ladybirds, beetles, wood louse, spiders and spiderlings, moths, butterflies, small birds, hover flies etc. It is a delight to sit in the garden or just walk around to see what we can find. My daughter loves a garden bug scavenger hunt!
Our Garden Wildlife Galley
sowgrowharvest.co.uk 
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