How To Encourage Hedgehogs In To Your Garden

This week saw the Hampton Court Flower show put on a spectacular display of garden designs and there has been a special focus on hedgehogs this year with the ‘Hedgehog Street’ summer garden winning a gold medal.

The aim of the Hedgehog Street garden at the flower show is to raise awareness of the threat UK hedgehogs are currently facing, after numbers have decreased by over a third in the last ten years. Here we take a look at how you can get involved and help encourage a cute little hedgehog to make your garden their home.

Provide Food and Water

Hedgehogs are greedy little characters with big appetites, they like to eat garden pests such as slugs and insects which is great news for gardeners. To make a feast for your hedgehog to eat you can  help encourage these sorts of creatures to your garden, simply add a log or compost pile which will attract more of the type of bugs hedgehogs love to feed on. Don’t worry about attracting these bad insects to your garden because a single hedgehog can put away 200g of bugs in one night!

You can also put food out for hedgehogs but this should only be a meat-based cat food or meal worms. DO NOT put out milk or bread as this will make your garden hedgehog very ill. To make sure the neighbours cat or a fox doesn’t steal the food you can cut a hole in a box and place the food inside so that only a hedgehog is small enough to get to it.

Adding a water feature to your garden can provide a drinking source for hedgehogs as well as making a great focal point for your garden. This could be a small pond or a ground water feature, so the hedgehog can easily get to it. If you don’t have the space for a pond simply put out a dish of water on a night time, make sure it is low enough for the hedgehog to be able to reach.

Create a Hedgehog House

The best way to encourage a hedgehog to make a home in your garden is to create a natural habitat for it to nest in. This could be a log pile, compost heap, or as their name implies – a hedge!

Hedges offer great cover and protection for hedgehogs to nest in, so planting a bush or hedge in your garden is a great way to provide a home. Alternatively you can buy a ready made hog house or make your own out of a plastic or wooden box. Place it somewhere under cover of a bush or tree to make it an even more homely and natural habitat.

Garden Perimeters

There is a misconception that hedgehogs are slow travelers, this is not the case. A fully grown hedgehog can travel up to 2 miles in a single night so you need to make sure your garden perimeter allows the hedgehog to come and go as he pleases.

One idea the ‘Hedgehog Street’ garden at the Hampton Court Flower show encouraged is to get together with your neighbours to ensure your gardens are joined with a gap or hole in the fence so that hedgehogs can wander from garden to garden as they please. This will keep them away from busy roads and allow them to have access to more food sources.

Gardening Style

Changing your gardening style to become hedgehog friendly is important and also really easy. Try not to be to obsessed with a really tidy garden as hedgehogs enjoy leaves and foliage to hide under which also attracts more of the type of bugs they eat.

If you have a deep pond place bricks to allow hedgehogs to safely get in and out of the water, as well as covering any holes or drain covers so they can’t fall in.

Refrain from using slug pellets as hedgehogs will digest the slugs and be poisoned, if you have an issue with slugs in your garden this will soon disappear when you have a hungry hedgehog living there as he will eat any unwanted guests like this.

Finally, check your garden for any objects that could injure the hedgehog such as netting or barbed wire and make sure this is removed.

Register Your Hedgehog Home

Once you have made your garden into the perfect hedgehog home why not take part in the PTE (People’s Trust For Endangered Species) and the British Hedgehog Preservation Societies ‘make a hole, make a difference’ scheme. This is a campaign to help keep track of the number of new homes that have been made for hedgehogs across the UK, this will hopefully go towards saving the now declining hedgehog population. Simply visit the website and enter your hog home location to the map, there are currently 353 new homes mapped and hopefully this will keep increasing!

Published July 10th, 2014 by Jordan. Article ref 2923

Tags: hedgehog

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