Garden – a place for many more

When living in an apartment, we dreamed of a garden for several reasons: to be able to be outside in good and not as good weather, to play in the garden, and to have a garden with many different plants and creatures that can live and thrive in it. This is a joy with a garden ,we think. And we enjoy it. A lot.

We are so happy for such a diverse planting in our garden and we are very grateful to the previous owners of Puk. So many insect friendly species grow here (oregano, lupines, centaurea, aquilegia, butterfly bush, anemonies, and etc.), and there is lots of food for birds as we have many berries. We have observed different bees, hover flies, butterflies and etc., and of course enjoy blackbirds and other small birds singing for us the year around. Just imagine if we had a garden that should have been established from a scratch. It would take us many years to get what we have now. And we want to contribute also ourselves and have more plants and invite more creatures to come and live at us.

Since we haven’t encountered lizards and hedgehog, we decided to establish ‘homes’ for them to attract them to our garden: wood and stones where they can hide and provided water. Maybe they are in the garden, although we haven’t spotted them.

We haven’t either seen frogs or toads until last Wednesday. I discovered a toad when went out to hang the laundry up outside at night. A pretty big one, jumping firstly around and then into the garden pond. It was such a delight to see this creature. Maybe it is the drought in Denmark that made the toad to move in to our pond? We wonder if it can have eggs in our pond? I really hope so, as the chance that our gold fish will eat the eggs, is rather big. We are trying to find a new home for our gold fish since last year (sorry dear ex-owners of Puk if they were dare to you), as we want the pond be a place for more diverse small wildlife such as frogs, salamanders and etc., but, well, haven’t succeed yet. So the fish still live at us, and I bet are glad having a chance to get some deli toad eggs for their dinner. But maybe they don’t. You never know.

We have been talking about building a couple of insect hotels since last year, but then decided to prioritize providing the insects with food firstly. So, we had this bare soil towards our sweet neighbor Ms. G. It was used as a kitchen garden by ex-owners of Puk. They grew their own food and shared it with the entire neighborhood. I wish we could do the same. But we realized that we were not going to be able to cultivate the entire piece. So we decided to create a kind of a ‘meadow’ for insects. We purchased some insect friendly flower seed mix and sowed it. I honestly didn’t expect much to grow there, as there were lots of other plants that have rigorously and without permission seeded themselves there since last year. But to my surprise a couple of plants from the seed mix made it. Among them the most amazing was the purple tansy (phacelia tanacetifolia) with purple, gorgeous flowers that almost covered the ground. I have never heard of tansies before. No wonder, as they are a native to American prairie. And I am totally in love with them. They create so much life around themselves. Fantastic insect plants. It was literally a meditation to come close to the ‘meadow’ and hear hundreds of bumble bees buzz around them. If you had a bad day, you could just go there, see the bees enjoy the food you provided to them and hear them a couple of minutes, and that was it, your day was saved. If I am able to get time to hedge some of the weeds, which we actually try to call useless plants, from the ‘meadow’ this fall and next spring, we might get a more diverse planting in our ‘meadow’. Cross fingers for me.

Since I mentioned weeds, I would like to share my thoughts about them in my next post. For now, I have to admit that attracting insects has been the easiest way to encourage wildlife in our garden. When you grow the plants they like, they visit your garden. I am glad for our efforts.