Top Tips to Help Keep Your Garden Buzzing

As the days stay warmer and the nights feel longer, a lot of us start to work on getting the garden summer-ready, to create a place to entertain friends and family but also to house the beautiful wildlife. We’ve created a list of top tips to help keep your wildlife garden buzzing this summer. 

Picking your plants 

If you’re looking for tips on how to encourage wildlife in your garden, it’s important to consider what type of flowers you plant, generally, plants with a single flower like roses, clematis, hollyhocks, geraniums, lavender, and edible herbs with flowers are ideal to attract bees into your garden. These wildlife garden plants tend to contain more pollen and nectar, encouraging bees to visit your garden. Planting herbs such as thyme, origanum and chives not only provide pollen to bees, they’re perfect to use in the kitchen! 

Add water to your garden 

Adding water to your garden is a way great to attract aquatic wildlife as well as providing a place to drink for mammals and birds. This also benefits bees, like all creatures they need to drink and a wildlife garden pond, water feature or even a birdbath will provide them with much-needed moisture. 

Let it grow! 

By cutting your grass less often, it gives lawn flowers like daisies, dandelions, white clover and selfheal the chance to bloom. Research by Plantlife shows that cutting your lawn every four weeks results in enough nectar for ten times more bees and other pollinators. You may want to consider allowing an area to grow wild, this boosts the diversity of flowers and allows nectar-rich plants to blossom and is ideal for creating a wildlife friendly garden. You might be surprised by how many flowers will naturally grow, adding colour to your garden. 

Build a bee house 

A great way to attract garden wildlife like bees to your garden is by building a bee house. This is a perfect activity to do with the kids and teach them a little about protecting our wildlife. A bee house is a simple structure made from a timber frame and filled with pieces of bamboo. You can get creative if you wish and create a bee hotel, complete with a coin-sized swimming pool! Bee houses allow female bees to place a portion of pollen inside the bee house and lay a single egg before sealing up the entrance with mud. The egg hatches into larvae, which will feed on the pollen until new bees emerge the following spring. 

If you’re unsure where to start with gardening, check out our gardening for beginners article with a series of how-tos. We would love to see what you do with your Jelson garden, tag us in your photos on Facebook and Instagram.