How to Attract More Wildlife Into Your Garden

Wildlife friendly gardening is so important for preventing climate change and protecting our environment. There are so many easy ways to incorporate natural gardening practices into your daily routine!

We’ve found the best ways to encourage beneficial insects into your garden! Before you know it, you’ll have a thriving, happy garden filled with healthy soil, flowering plants, slow worms, butterfly caterpillars, more garden birds, and lots of insects.

Don’t worry though, we only let harmless insects into our garden! 

How to Encourage Wildlife and Insects in Your Garden

Keep reading to learn our top tips for encouraging more wildlife and insects into your garden. This is the definitive list of wildlife friendly gardening practices… 

Create An Environment That Will Attract Wildlife and Insects

Perhaps most importantly, you need to create an environment that will attract wildlife and insects.

Your garden needs to be prosperous, happy, and filled with food and security. Insects will come to your garden in droves if you have plenty of food and shelter for them! 

Provide Shelter to Insects 

Insects love shelter and safety! Create shelter in your garden by hallowing the stems of herbaceous plants and shrubs. Have you thought of purchasing bee hotels for example?

You can also leave dead wood in your garden. Insects love to burrow and find shelter in these leafy places. You can also provide food to insects to make them extra happy! 

Minimise Pests

In order to have a wildlife friendly garden, you need to have good pest management. Pests can seriously harm the native wildlife in your garden.

Make sure to invest in environmentally friendly pest control methods to attract more birds and insects into your garden. 

Find Out What Native Species You Have

Finding out what kind of native species you have can be really helpful in supporting them. You can attract bats, bees, insects, and birds into your rock garden by researching what they are and what they like!

For example, hibernating insects in early spring will look for more sheltered areas in rock gardens or pond life. It’s so helpful to find out how to best help your native insects and wildlife! 

Plant Bee Friendly Plants

Attract bees into your own garden by planting bee-friendly flowers. Attracting bees is as simple as planting wildflower seeds.

Once the seeds have flourished, you’ll have a beautiful wildflower meadow and lots of amazing bees. You’ll be pleased to know, a wildflower meadow is super easy to maintain! The bees do most of the hard work for you! 

Provide Food

Insects are always on the hunt for food! Provide food to insects through pollen, bugs, nectar, leaves, wood, or mould.

You’ll attract bees, worms, beetles, and other insects by giving them lots of delicious food! Wildlife gardening can be as simple as providing extra food and sustenance in your outdoor spaces! 

Buy a Bird Bath

Bird baths are a lovely place for birds to bathe and relax. Especially in summer, birds use the bath to wash their feathers and loosen the dirt.

This makes them easier to preserve and maintain. More birds in your garden means you have a healthy, happy space that attracts wildlife. Naturally, this means you also have more insects! 

Use Natural Pest Control

Chemicals in your garden can inadvertently poison insects, hedgehogs, and other animals. Avoid using chemicals and instead opt for natural methods of pest control and fertilisation. Insects live and eat in your garden all the time.

Try to help them as much as possible! This helps to maintain a stable insect population and protects the environment! 

Keep Dead Wood

Dead wood is a haven for garden wildlife! All sorts of garden wildlife love living amongst dead wood, fruit trees, or crab apple trees!

Insects, beetles, wild birds, plants, and other invertebrates love feasting on the fungi that grow from dead wood and log piles.

If you want to attract insects and wildlife to your garden, keep any dead wood that is lying around! Before you know it, you will encourage birds, insects, and animals into your wildlife haven. 

Make a Hedgehog Highway

Attract wildlife and hedgehogs by building a hedgehog highway for them! A hedgehog highway is a safe space, filled with native plants to attract wildlife.

A hedgehog highway is essentially a series of holes and routes between fences and plants that accommodate hedgehogs and other small mammals.

A lovely byproduct of the hedgehog house is insects! Insects love these natural spaces to hang out. After building a hedgehog highway, you’ll notice more hedgehogs, insects, small mammals, garden birds, and wood mice in your garden.

All of these small creatures help promote the growth and development of your garden. It really is a win win! 

Build a Compost Heap

Your own compost heap is an easy, environmentally friendly landscape feature to incorporate into your garden. Don’t actively prevent insects and other local wildlife from entering your garden.

Instead, try to encourage them! A compost heap does this very well! Compost heaps are a great nesting site for hedgehogs, insects, and other small animals.

They can also be used as safe spaces to forage and hunt! If you live in an urban area, your wildfield friendly garden will quickly become a stark contrast to the uninhabitable concrete jungle.

It’s the perfect way to encourage many insects into your garden! 

Garden Sustainably  

Sustainable gardening is one of the best ways to attract animals and insects. Insects hate nasty chemicals and pollutants.

They are always on the hunt for natural, eco-friendly places to call home! Get rid of store-bought pesticides and focus on natural methods.

Attract birds, bees, insects, and other wildlife into the back garden with eco-friendly practices. We promise you’ll never look back once you’ve tried sustainable, wildlife friendly gardening! 

Make an Insect Hotel 

Creating an insect hotel or hedgehog house in your garden will promote wildlife safety. A shady, leafy section of your garden enables insects  to forage, rest, and rest in safety.

This is a low maintenance and very effective method to help insects. To make an insect hotel, simply find a shaded area and add extra plants, foliage, and wood to it.

You can also purchase an insect hotel from a garden centre or build your own from plywood! Native wildlife will also love your insect hotel! 

Put Up a Bird Box

Bird boxes give food to local birds and provide shelter for them. A bird box, bird table, nesting boxes, or a garden pond will attract more birds into your garden.

They love to snack on all the delicious bird seeds in the box. Fat balls are so much better than scavenging for cat food. 

Plant Wild Flowers 

Bees and insects love wild flowers. They are their natural home! Plant more wild flowers and you’ll see a boom in insects and bees in your garden!

Mason bees in particular love wild flowers. Pick some seedlings up at your local garden centre and get planting! 

Let Your Garden Grow Wild

Insects and wildlife adore an overgrown, natural garden. Sometimes the best thing you can do is forgo the super manicured garden.

Instead, opt for a more natural look that takes a walk on the wild side. Letting your garden grow wild gives insects and wildlife more space to forage, rest, and eat. 

Learn About the Environment 

Learn as much as you can about the environment. This way you can help support insects and wildlife as much as possible! 

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading about how to attract insects and wildlife into your garden. Let us know how these tips and tricks have worked out for you.

Make sure to comment below if you have any other tips and tricks for attracting more insects and wildlife!