Jenny Steel's Wildlife Gardening Calendar
10/03/2010
The British are well known as lovers of birds and nature in general and several years ago it was estimated that we spend more than £200 million a year on bid food and feeders – an absolutely extraordinary amount that shows just...
Creature Feature and Plant of The Month - March 2010
10/03/2010
Every garden has its compliment of small creatures that we never see, either because they are shy, nocturnal or too small to notice – or sometimes all three. The common shrew falls into all of these categories, being a very small...
Jenny Steel: A Bit About Me...
16/03/2010
Although I had always welcomed birds and butterflies into my garden, I created my first ‘proper’ wildlife garden in 1988. It was a typical small garden on a housing estate, just 15 meters long and 5 meters across, so not much room for a great deal!
Jenny Steel's Wildlife Gardening Calendar - March 2010
01/04/2010
March is the start of spring. Or is it? Apparently not this year, as the very cold, wintry weather continued through the first two weeks of the month and then reappeared in the form of snow for some of us in the last week. What a long...
Creature Feature and Plant of The Month - April 2010
07/04/2010
As the weather gets a little warmer, a whole legion of creatures of various sorts are waking up from winter hibernation and roaming your garden - sometimes in the dead of night! We only see a small proportion of the animals that have...
Jenny Steel's Wildlife Gardening Calendar - April 2010
30/04/2010
April and at last spring arrived! It took a while as the beginning of the month was still very cold, wet and windy here but in spite of that it was necessary to get out and start to prepare the garden for the season ahead, however cold it was!
Creature Feature and Plant of The Month - May 2010
30/04/2010
The bank vole is a fairly common creature in larger gardens even if we don’t see it very frequently - we are more likely to find their sometimes annoying network of runs and holes they make in our lawns! In our countryside they live in woodland, along...
Creature Feature and Plant of the Month – July 2010
30/06/2010
July sees the appearance in the countryside of one of our most beautiful butterflies, the marbled white. In spite of its name it is not a close relative of the other ‘whites’ that eat our cabbages, the small, large and green-veined white butterflies, but is actually...
Jenny Steel's Wildlife Gardening Calendar - June 2010
30/06/2010
June is the real beginning of summer and a busy month in any garden. In a wildlife friendly garden though, it’s a time when we are flooded with young birds, especially tits, blackbirds and finches, so the feeders empty at an alarming rate and need to be topped up daily, and numbers of butterflies and bees increase...