Ellie's Wellies - Organic Gardening

Ellie's Wellies - Organic Gardening Organic Wildlife Gardener, making and maintaining wildlife-friendly, beautiful outdoor spaces. Writer for Plantlife: saving wild plants 🌱

Botany nerd, horticulturally obsessed and passionate about protecting our non-human neighbours 🦉🐛🕷️🐝🦔🐦‍⬛🐞🦡. We watch, listen, read, breathe and live all things gardening, ecology and the environment. We have our own podcast too! https://www.facebook.com/thewildlifegardenpodcast

An image I associate more with mid-late autumn than August; yellowing leaves and spooders, but beautiful nonetheless 🍂
22/08/2026

An image I associate more with mid-late autumn than August; yellowing leaves and spooders, but beautiful nonetheless 🍂

Its ! Just a handful of plants rIght now; due to the drought, but mostly because I bizarrely haven't taken many photos!...
21/08/2026

Its !

Just a handful of plants rIght now; due to the drought, but mostly because I bizarrely haven't taken many photos!

Feeling pretty fuzzy inside at how the new build garden pond has come along. I finished planting it up during the eclipse ✨.

It's meadow management season! 🌱🌱🌱I've developed and tended to this mini meadow in a medium urban garden for a few years...
20/08/2026

It's meadow management season! 🌱🌱🌱

I've developed and tended to this mini meadow in a medium urban garden for a few years now. I love seeing how its plant composition has changed over time, from the Wild Carrot year to the year of the Knapweed. What will happen next year I wonder 🤔?

I'll be cutting the vast majority of it down now, but instead of removing the vegetation, I'm making twigwams as habitat stacks. The clippings are contained in this structure, giving refuge for anything that needs it over the cold winter months, and giving something interesting to look at on an otherwise flat border.

What's more, the wood for the twigwam (hidden in the vegetation) came from this garden too; nothing but a bit of jute twine was purchased 🥳✨

❄️

On this I'm celebrating the teeny tiny, with help from someone in an invertebrate ID Facebookgroup. Waddling across my...
19/08/2026

On this I'm celebrating the teeny tiny, with help from someone in an invertebrate ID Facebook
group.

Waddling across my garden one morning was this Scymnus sp. ladybird larva. Without a microscope and probably looking at it's ge****ls (it's always the ge****ls 😆) that's as close as ID can be taken.

We've got 9 Scymnus sp. ladybird in the UK, all doing the ladybird thing of munching aphids, mealybugs and scale insects. They're only 1.5-3mm long so you'd be forgiven for missing them!

Just yet another reason to ⚠️

17/08/2026

Aaaaaaand BREATHE 😃🥹🥳🌱💧✨🌍❤️....

This comes to you from a garden I look after with a remarkably high water table. I have to say that in case you think ...
14/08/2026

This comes to you from a garden I look after with a remarkably high water table.

I have to say that in case you think that thousands of litres of water have been poured into it. It's definitely the greenest space I can think of right now, out of the 30+ gardens I look after.

If your garden is not looking like this, please DON'T PANIC. Well, I mean do panic about the we're all in now, and keep doing what you can to demand Andy Burnham does something more drastic than banning disposable BBQs.

But our gardens are just the canary in the coalmine. Everyone is in the same boat, and we all have a responsibility to tread gently, and be resourceful and as sustainable as we can in our gardens.

And so the inferno that is our planet continues to burn....Keep saving water where you can, but pleeeeeease don't throw ...
13/08/2026

And so the inferno that is our planet continues to burn....

Keep saving water where you can, but pleeeeeease don't throw washing up water around your garden.

All the literature states that soil microbial life breaks detergents down making it ok for your plants. But what if they hit an amphibian lurking in your borders? These guys breathe through their skin and detergents are bad bad baaaaad news for them.

Better to flush your loo with the soapy water 👍

12/08/2026

Its !!!

This week is a wildlife rescue story. Torn from the murderous jaws of the dreaded garden waste bin, this Privet Hawkmoth (Sphinx ligustri) caterpillar will live to see another day ❤️😃.

The caterpillars are active July-September, and then pupate 30cm underground (or in a compost bin as I once found).

They eat: Privet, young Ash saplings, Guelder Rose, Holly, Honeysuckle, Snowberry, Forsythia (something eats it!!),
Spiraea, and Lilac.

The magnificent adults emerge the following June and can be seen flying into July.

Keep hold of as much of your garden waste as you can and build a compost bin, or pile things at the back of the garden if you have space, to give hiding wildlife a chance to escape ✨.

Sowing seed is one of the most positive actions us humans can take.It's about helping our plants propagate. It helps the...
11/08/2026

Sowing seed is one of the most positive actions us humans can take.

It's about helping our plants propagate. It helps them, they help the planet, and a functioning planet is of course what we need.

Here's a tray of Achillea millefolium (Yarrow) that I sowed while filming for September's edition of the Wildlife Garden Project CIC free monthly wildlife garden guide.

It all popped up in just 3 days ✨. Grow, my prettiest!

I try to limit the number of straight up personal posts that I do, but as well as celebrating my dear, dear friends from...
10/08/2026

I try to limit the number of straight up personal posts that I do, but as well as celebrating my dear, dear friends from this weekend, I wanted to get you to guess where we met up, because the colour of the landscape is extremely misleading.

The endless beige is sending me into a panicked state 😟. We have spent so long in Britain, moaning about our rainy weather, but that rain was why we had such a green and lush landscape.

The impact of this beige is palpable. Birdsong (naturally lower now anyway because our feathery ones are often off moulting) is at an absolute all time low like I've never experienced. Eff knows what Blackbirds, badgers, moles etc are finding for food with the baked earth. Deep rooted trees are now dropping leaves with the water stress; it looked autumnal in some areas 😞.

But some positives: I did see a huge gathering of House Martins, getting ready to leave our shores (and a Sparrow Hawk successfully catching one mid air to feed!). A saw Yellow Wagtails for the first time ❤️. Oh and I started carving my second ever spoon.

The things we can do in our gardens and on our streets and in our parks are increasingly crucial 💪.

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