Making a mini wetland

Making a mini wetland in your garden can not only bring a diverse range of animals and insect life, but can also help with the distribution and transfer of rain water. Warden Cath shares her very own mini-wetland

Helping wetland nature and getting creative at home can be really easy and a fun activity to get the whole family involved in. They can be done with things you already have, so are inexpensive and eco-friendly too!

WWT warden Cath Robson took the creativity challenge and created this incredibly bio-diverse mini wetland in her own garden, using plants and equipment she already had and a few things from friends and family. Cath tells us why she wanted to build a mini wetland and what she's seen since introducing it into her garden:

"Some time ago, well before ‘lockdown’ was a thing, I’d been inspired to have a go at building a mini wetland using the rainwater down pipe at the front of my house. However, despite my enthusiasm it never really worked out.

Fast forward to spring 2020 during a spell of great weather and all the time in the world thanks to lockdown, I chose to re-site it to the sunny rear garden. After few false starts, I decided to have a ‘damp meadow’ at the top rather than the mini pond as I wasn’t convinced that the re-purposed plastic storage box would be stable enough once filled with water."

"Water flows into the wet meadow box from an off-cut of guttering, filtering through some gravel in the top corner, before soaking into the mixture of garden soil and spent compost. It then drains away through a small hole drilled in the bottom corner of the box and down a short piece of guttering into the lower pond layer.

Once the pond is full, the excess water drains away into an existing gravel soak away through a couple of small holes drilled near the top of the plastic box, which sits on an old piece of carpet. I planted the meadow with two or three damp-loving plants, plus a few Beebombs and let anything else which chose to germinate remain and grow.

Watching our mini wetland establish and develop has certainly been one of life’s simple pleasures during these strange times. Within days it was providing mud to line the blackbirds’ nest and after a couple of weeks it was home to 3 frogs who had relocated from a nearby pond. The vegetation changes with the seasons and I have tinkered with the surrounding bricks and logs to make it look more attractive and provide better habitat for minibeasts. It’s definitely still a work in progress but I really look forward to seeing what the next year brings…"

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