Cottage garden wildlife
Two of our regular fox diners
As well as regular fox diners, we now have a cottage garden hedgehog to add to the mix of creatures feeling at home here.
This cottage garden style is a lovely jumble of growth in summer and I love to see wildlife of all kinds. I wrote about the reality of having creatures in your garden here and how I put up with pigeons, squirrels, parakeets, magpies and the rest in order to have the nice ones too like birds, mice, newts, frogs and foxes. Feeding and caring for the creatures we share the garden with are a big part of the daily joy of having a garden at all.
A hedgehog arrives
I could hardly believe my eyes when one evening a month ago I saw a hedgehog eating the plate of dog food I’d left out for the foxes.
We’d had a hedgehog about 6 years ago but not a sight of one since. They are rare and endangered and I wasn’t expecting to see one again.
There it was munching its way across the plate of Chum.
Our new hedgehog
Hedgehog clock
He? She? has been coming every evening for weeks now at around dusk at 9.30pm almost precisely. It must be waiting nearby because it starts munching within minutes of my putting the plate out. I now put out two plates, one for hedgehog and one for the foxes.
Reading about them, they have a round trip they make every night visiting 20 houses and apparently they know exactly where they are going. It’s so vital that we leave a gap in our boundaries for them to get through. They sleep during the day in dry piles of leaves or garden waste.
Hedgehog hideaways
This messy style of garden has more holes than fence, with the greenery holding the bits of fence up rather than the other way around. There must be so many cosy undisturbed little places for a hedgehog to hide out in. That’s one of the things I love about having a garden to try and attract and encourage wildlife.
Some hardy geranium plants came from the wonderful Cranesbill nursery and they were packed in straw
Straw for a hedgehog bed
which I pushed into a space at the back of the border
A cosy corner
A lovely little habitat.
Hedgehog snack
Emergency meeting – hedgehog alert
These guys don’t bother me now. I’m ashamed to tell you what I used to do with them so I won’t.
Hedgehogs eat slugs – all part of the cycle. Not much I could do about them anyway even if I wanted to.
Family group
Feral cat watching our cat watching hedgehog
Feral cat watching our cat watching the hedgehog. Everyone rubs along fine. Cats and hedgehogs don’t seem to mind each other at all. Foxes seem fine with it all too. Seeing as I feed them all I guess they know what’s good for them.
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Julie
