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robins were collecting material but now just the one flies to and from the shed with insects to feed the other one, so Chris assumes the eggs have been laid and the female is brooding them (usually up to five). The eggs are normally incubated for around

your plant regularly and feed once a week with diluted tomato fertiliser when flowers appear. This encourages the plants to keep flowering and produce more fruit.Find out whether your plant is a cordon or bush type. Cordons usually produce regular

of this Chelsea perfection in my own garden. But then it wouldn't be mine. I like my scruffy, battered, half-eaten plants. I like the fact that there are caterpillars available for the birds to feed their chicks with, though I could do without the pigeons

nitrogen-fixing nodules feed the bulbs, but even if they don't the pots look a lot nicer in autumn with a covering of leaves. I then let them grow right through spring – they help hide the bulb’s foliage as it dies down, and of course, the flowers are a

and a pond. Every year a colony of buff-tailed bumblebees nests beneath the neighbours' shed and feeds on my mum's flowers, I'm sure the butterflies do the same. My dad has a nest of common carder bumblebees in his ramshackle allotment compost heap, just

will be reduced, while caterpillar food plants could die through lack of water, taking the caterpillars (and therefore butterflies) with them. The dry, hard ground will make life hard for robins and blackbirds looking for worms to feed themselves and their young

at the edge of the water in total darkness with bats swirling around me.Like so much of our wildlife, bats are having a hard time. This is mostly due to the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture. British bats feed exclusively on insects, so spraying

concern ourselves with the slugs that eat our plants. But look inside your compost bin and you might find their yellow cousins, Limax flavus. Yellow slugs are a gardener’s friend, as they feed almost exclusively on decaying matter. I have only once seen

startled in Dorset was probably a slow worm or grass snake (pictured above). These benign species often turn up in gardens, mostly in the south of England, and very rarely in the north. They bask in rockeries, feed in ponds and breed in compost heaps

are unlikely to nest a busy location (for example if the box is too near a feeding station), or anywhere with strong sunlight or a prevailing wind. It’s generally advised to place the box in a north-easterly direction, but if shadows are provided by tall