23/03/2009 by nigel.

So the beech and silver birch trees arrive… Its been raining and the ground is soggy and sticky but I need to get out there and plant them as they have been in transit for a couple of days and I need to get the roots back into the ground.. So home from work… a quick cuppa and off we go..

An couple of hours later and the beech hedge is in along with the silver birch.

As the plan is to create an enclose secluded wildlife area the the sides and the end of the garden needed hedges too. So for the end of the garden I decided on a willow hedge this comprised of 20 plants 4-5 ft tall and for the sides a wildlife mix that consisted of privet, willow, dogrose,maple and walnut, these were all around 3-4ft tall and totalled to 33 plants.
I ordered these and again I then had a couple of days rain or shine to get out the back and dig the trenches..

A couple of days later the plants arrived… Some hours later and all of the plants were in..

Ok it looks like a lot of twigs at the moment but a couple of years down the line and hopefully the desired effect should be achieved.

The running total cost so far is £182.83 including postage costs and some hard graft..

Next ACAP Phase two.. A Wildlife Pond..

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18/03/2009 by nigel.

I have been looking back through the feeder history and picked out a few more pictures of other visitors to the feeder..

Long Tailed Tit

This is a strange looking furry bird!!

Starling in Vertical Flight…..

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17/03/2009 by nigel.

The frogs have been quite active in the pond of late.. there is now quite a bit of Frog spawn around the edge of the pond..

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17/03/2009 by nigel.

This was a first for me… I had never seen a Goldcrest until this one visited the feeder..

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17/03/2009 by nigel.

I am embarking on a project to make the garden more wildlife friendly and to be honest look a lot nicer.. At the moment the garden is pretty bare with only a few shrubs and small bushes.

Recently some of our neighbours cut there hedges right back and removed some trees from the gardens, this has appeared to have an impact on the amount of birds visiting the feeders in the garden. So this was one of the motivations to overhaul the garden..

Because of the current financial climate in the UK I decided I would try and do this as cheap as I possibly could and post my findings on this blog to help others make there own wildlife gardens for minimal cost. I have decided to call it my “As Cheap As Project” ACAP for short.

Now I’m no experienced gardener so this is going to be a learning curve for me. So armed with some gardening books and some advice from a few green fingered friends I am kicking off the ACAP with a wildlife section to the garden.
The garden is approximately 80ft in length from the patio and about 32ft wide.
So after a chat with the wife we decided that the bottom third of the garden would become the wild
section.. I would separate this from the rest of the garden with a hedge, leaving a gap in the middle for access. The perimeter of the rest of the section comprises of fence panels and a brick wall, so we decide to hedging all the way round. The hope is that after x amount of years this will turn into a little secluded wildlife haven.

So with an idea for phase one on paper the ACAP begins.

I started by looking at garden centres for shrubs, trees, hedging but these were very expensive. So I turned to the web which ended up at ebay. Ok next where do I start, what plants do I want? So a quick Google on UK wildlife friendly plants gave me an idea of what I wanted. As it was I didn’t even need to do this as an ebay search on wildlife hedging revealed sellers that sold exactly that, a mix of countryside wildlife friendly hedging at a very good price compared with garden centres.

So the first hedge to plant would be the dividing hedge, for this we decided to use beech. The reason we chose this is that it gives pretty much a full time barrier in that the leaves are green in the spring summer and in the autumn winter the leaves turn brown but don’t fall off the tree until the new green ones are about to appear.

So into ebay.. a quick search for Beech .. I purchased 30 4-5ft beech trees for just over £50.00.
These were set to arrive in the next couple of days so I had to get out to the garden and prepare a trench ready for planting. I also came across 3x 8ft silver birch trees for £28.00 including postage so I purchased these too.

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