A bug hotel is a fantastic way to use garden waste to encourage wildlife, and helpful flora and fauna, into your garden.
Rather than throwing your cuttings, leaves, twigs and other garden waste away, use them instead to create a fantastic home for insects and other helpful visitors to your garden. Simply create a pile from the biodegradable waste in an area of your garden that would benefit from compost and leave nature to do the rest! You can create larger “hotels” using small logs and cuttings from larger plants and trees by piling them in a way that leaves plenty of gaps for creatures to gain access.
These hotels will then attract anything from hibernating hedgehogs to bumblebees, frogs and toads to ladybirds and woodlice which can all help in combating those less helpful visitors to your garden when they emerge from hibernation in the spring.
Bug Hotel by Sue Rickhuss from Pixabay
Why not get creative with the kids and create a work of art from the materials at hand? The RSPB have some good advice on how to structure your creation. Or, if you’d prefer to keep it simple, just push the materials you’d like to use under a chosen shrub or tree, and it will gradually turn into a fantastic compost.
However you decide to create your bug hotel, autumn is the best time to start creating and, by the time spring comes around, you will not only have some fantastic compost to help your garden grow, but also a wonderful array of wildlife to benefit your soil and plants.
