Our prickly friends
There is so much we can all do to make our gardens more hedgehog friendly. Here are some great starting points.
Maintain hedgehog routes between gardens
Hedgehogs travel a mile or more during each night, be it in search or food or to find a mate, so they need to be able to travel between our gardens unhindered. When we had a new fence a couple of years back, we asked the installer to create a few hedgehog sized, 13cm x 13cm, gaps beneath it. He was perfectly happy to do so and had done the same for some other clients – so we all need to be asking fencing installers to do that so that it just becomes the norm. I have also seen purpose made ‘doorways’ in situ between gardens and labelled up as a Hedgehog Highway, which is a fun solution!
Top tip: if practical, also make your garden badger proof at the same time. Badgers are able to unroll a hedgehog, so their main defence method does not work against badgers.
Make sure they have somewhere to take cover and rest
Log piles are good for nature in so many ways, but one way is that log piles with spaces near the base can provide shelter, or even a nesting or hibernation place, for a hedgehog. I ‘thatch’ mine with autumn leaves too for a bit of extra insulation from the weather.
You can also build or buy a hedgehog house or make your own. There are plans for these online.
Provide food and water
I put out clean water in a shallow receptacle, but they still prefer the water from the saucers under my flower pots! They will also drink from ponds, but do make sure they can get out of the pond should they fall in, by having a shallow end.
Providing food will allow you to more easily watch them, but also helps them out and can be important for hedgehogs born late in the year without much time to put on weight before hibernating. There are different makes of dry hedgehog food available but they also like meat based cat or dog food.
It is important not to feed them mealworms. They love them and will eagerly hoover them all up, but they can cause bone defects, including causing birth defects in hoglets.
Make a feeding station so that you are not simply feeding your neighbours’ cats! The simplest way is to use an upturned plastic crate with a 13cm 13cm opening cut in it as a door. A brick about 10cm out, in front of the door will stop cats being able to creep in. (We do have a blackbird who happily hops inside the following morning to hoover up any left overs!)
Be a nature friendly gardener
Avoid bonfires – they are just not needed. Likewise, any chemical ending in ‘cide’ is designed to kill something and will be bad for nature, find a different solution. Slug pellets are a particular problem for hedgehogs, and if you have hedgehogs you just will not need slug pellets anyway as the hedgehogs will eat up the slugs and snails. Before our hedgehogs arrived I used to use wool pellets to keep the slugs away from particular plants.
Insecticides will dimmish other components of their natural diet. Far better to garden a way that encourages more insects, choosing native British plants with lots of nectar and pollen, leaving some wilder areas and simply not being too tidy in the garden. If you have a healthy variety of insects they should find a good balance, with numbers of troublesome insects being controlled by others.
And who needs a stripey lawn? Mow at most, once a month. Better still, mow pathways but leave at least part of your lawn to grow from No Mow May until the early autumn.
Think hedgehog safety
Avoid bonfires, or if you feel you must have one build it on the same day you burn it. If using nets to protect plants take steps to avoid hedgehogs being able to get tangled in them. Plastic rings and bags can be dangerous to wildlife so tidy them away. Check you drains are covered as young hedgehogs could fall down them (as can frogs and toads).
And do let us know if you have hedgehogs visiting your garden and if you do, spread the word with your neighbours so we can all work together to make their lives a little easier.