Helping Hedgehogs: Your Garden Slug Patrol

Of all the wildlife you can welcome into a vegetable garden, the hedgehog might be the hardest-working. A single hedgehog can travel a kilometre or more in one night, snuffling through borders and beds, and most of what it eats is exactly what eats your crops. If you have ever found a row of lettuce seedlings reduced to stalks by morning, a resident hedgehog is the kind of free, night-shift slug patrol you want on your side.

The trouble is that hedgehogs are in serious decline across the UK — they have vanished from many gardens where they were once common. The good news is that gardens, taken together, add up to a huge area of potential habitat, and a few simple changes can make yours a place hedgehogs can reach, shelter in, and thrive. This guide is part of our wider wildlife-friendly garden approach, where the whole point is that a healthier garden grows better food.

Why hedgehogs help your harvest

Hedgehogs are insectivores, and their diet reads like a list of the pests every grower dreads. They eat slugs and snails, of course, but also beetles, caterpillars, millipedes, earwigs and the larvae of various flies. On a single night's foraging a hedgehog will hoover up dozens of the very creatures that shred seedlings and chew holes in leafy greens.

That matters most in late spring and early summer, when young plants are at their most vulnerable. Slugs and snails do the most damage to tender transplants — newly set-out lettuce, brassica plants, courgette seedlings and the soft new growth on beans. A garden with hedgehogs working through it after dark loses fewer of these plants, which means more of what you sow actually makes it to harvest.

It is worth being honest: a hedgehog will not solve a full-blown slug outbreak on its own, and you should not expect one to. But as part of a balanced garden — alongside a wildlife pond for frogs and a few pollinator plants drawing in hoverflies — hedgehogs tip the balance steadily in your favour, season after season.

Hedgehog highways: the single most important thing

If you do only one thing for hedgehogs, make this it. Hedgehogs roam widely each night, and a garden that is sealed off behind solid fences and walls is, to a hedgehog, a dead end. Many gardens are simply unreachable — and a hedgehog that cannot get in cannot eat your slugs.

The fix is a hedgehog highway: a gap roughly 13cm square (about the size of a CD case) cut at the base of a fence or wall, letting hedgehogs pass freely between gardens. A 13cm gap is big enough for any hedgehog but too small for most pets, so it will not let the neighbour's dog through.

You can make a highway in a few ways:

• Cut or saw a 13cm square hole at the bottom of a wooden fence panel or gravel board.
• Dig a shallow channel under a fence or wall where the ground allows.
• Leave a gap when you replace fence panels, or fit a purpose-made hedgehog gate.

A single gap turns your isolated plot into part of a much larger feeding ground. It is the difference between hoping a hedgehog wanders in and giving it a front door.

Shelter: somewhere to nest and hibernate

Hedgehogs need safe, dry, undisturbed places to sleep through the day, to raise their young, and — crucially — to hibernate over winter. A tidy garden swept clean of every leaf and twig offers none of this. A slightly wilder one offers plenty.

The easiest shelter to provide costs nothing: a log pile in a quiet, shady corner. Stack a few logs and let them slowly rot, and you create both a hedgehog refuge and a breeding ground for the beetles and woodlice they feed on. A heap of leaves left in an out-of-the-way spot does a similar job and gives hibernating hedgehogs ready-made bedding.

Leaving a wild corner — a patch of long grass, a tangle behind the compost bins, an unmown strip along a wildflower patch — gives hedgehogs cover to move and forage under without feeling exposed. This same untidy generosity feeds the wider food web your crops depend on, which is why we make the case for it across the whole wildlife-friendly garden.

If you want to go further, a hedgehog house gives a guaranteed weatherproof spot for nesting and hibernation. Tuck it into a shady, sheltered corner, face the entrance away from cold north and east winds, and cover it with leaves and brush so it feels hidden. Once a hedgehog moves in, leave it well alone.

Food and water

Hedgehogs find most of their own food — that is the whole point. But in dry spells, or in early spring and late autumn when natural food is scarce, a little extra help keeps them in good condition, and a reliable water source is welcome all year.

The single most useful thing you can put out is a shallow dish of fresh water, topped up daily. Hedgehogs get thirsty on their long nightly rounds, and water is especially important in hot, dry summer weather when slugs retreat and natural moisture is hard to find.

If you want to offer food, use meaty cat or dog food (not fish-based), or specialist hedgehog food. Put it out at dusk in a spot pets cannot easily reach, and clear away anything uneaten the next morning so it does not attract rats.

Food is a supplement, not a substitute. The aim is a garden so full of slugs, beetles and grubs that hedgehogs barely need your help — which is exactly the kind of garden that grows good vegetables, too.

Dangers to avoid in a veg garden

A productive vegetable garden can be a hazardous place for a hedgehog if you are not careful. Most of the dangers are easy to design out once you know about them.

Slug pellets. This is the big one for growers. The old blue metaldehyde slug pellets are banned in the UK (their outdoor use was prohibited from 2022) because of the harm they do to wildlife — and a hedgehog that eats poisoned slugs is poisoned in turn. Never use them. For slug control that does not harm hedgehogs, reach for wildlife-safe ferric phosphate pellets, or — better still — physical barriers and good habitat. Copper tape around pots, crushed eggshell or grit, beer traps, evening hand-picking and encouraging predators all help. The more you lean on hedgehogs, frogs and birds, the less you need pellets of any kind.

Strimmers and mowers. Hedgehogs sleep in long grass during the day and will not run from a strimmer — they curl up instead. Always check long grass, the bases of hedges and any rough patch by hand before strimming or mowing, especially through the breeding season.

Ground-level netting. Loose netting — over brassicas, strawberries or peas — is a classic hedgehog trap. They push into it, get tangled in the spines, and cannot escape. Keep netting taut and lifted at least 20–30cm off the ground, or use rigid mesh crop cages instead of draped netting.

Ponds without an exit. A wildlife pond is wonderful for the garden, but a hedgehog that falls in and finds only steep, slippery sides will drown. Always give a pond gently sloping sides or a ramp so any animal that falls in can climb out. (Open water is also a real risk to small children — site and supervise any pond accordingly.)

Bonfires. A heap of wood and leaves looks, to a hedgehog, exactly like the perfect nest. Never light a bonfire that has been standing — move the whole pile to a fresh spot on the day you burn it, or build and burn it the same day, checking carefully first.

Covered drains and gaps. Hedgehogs fall down uncovered drains and gully pots and cannot climb out. Keep drains covered. Steep-sided cellar wells and trenches dug for a project are worth covering or ramping overnight, too.

A little kit, after you've done the free things

You can do almost everything above for nothing — a saw for the highway, a dish from the kitchen, a heap of leaves left where they fall. Only once those basics are in place is it worth buying anything. If you would like to offer a guaranteed nesting and hibernation spot, a well-made hedgehog house is the one piece of kit that genuinely earns its place.

There is no rush. A log pile and a water dish will attract hedgehogs perfectly well; a shop-bought house simply makes their stay more reliable.

Bringing it together

Helping hedgehogs is one of the highest-value things a food grower can do for free. Cut a 13cm gap so they can reach you, leave a wild corner and a log pile so they can shelter, set out water, and design the obvious hazards out of your garden — pellets, low netting, steep ponds, standing bonfires. Do that, and you gain a tireless night-shift patrol working through your slugs, snails and caterpillars while you sleep.

Hedgehogs are one strand of a much bigger picture. For the full approach — pollinators that set your fruit, predators that eat your pests, and habitat that ties it all together — head back to the wildlife garden hub, and pair this with a wildlife pond and a wildflower patch to build a garden that defends and feeds itself.