Today I'm encouraging you to widen your focus to consider how green your garden really is.
By green I mean eco-friendly, sustainable and wildlife-friendly, buzzwords in gardening circles and for very good reason. There's an outside chance you think these ideas are pure eyewash and count for nothing, but if that's the case I'd be surprised you're reading this column since I keep banging on about them.
Whether your garden is big or small, points to consider are whether you cover it in concrete or plants, whether your chairs are made from rainforest destruction or FSC timber and whether you grow plants in organic or peat-riddled compost. Most importantly, do you compost and recycle kitchen and garden waste or consign it to landfill?
If you have or would like a vibrant, living garden and want to do your bit for the environment generally, why not arm yourself with your favourite tipple and take a stroll round your plot to contemplate the following 10 questions.
1) Do you make compost?
The compost heap is the richest, most environmentally-friendly part of any garden and returns invaluable nutrients to the soil. Score 10 if you compost all of your raw kitchen and garden waste (apart from diseased plant material). This includes weeds, grass clippings, paper, card and soft woody prunings. Still score 10 if you process some items as in question 5. Reduce your score to reflect the proportion of materials you don't recycle.
2) Do you keep your soil healthy?
Your plants are as good as the soil they grow in. Do you work to improve the quality of your soil? Do you enrich the soil with compost, leafmould and other biodegradable material, including spent potting compost? Do you keep the soil moist and crumbly by mulching?
3) Do you avoid damaging the soil?
Regular digging, double-digging and rotavating damages the invisible web of invaluable soil organisms. Over-fertilising the soil, even with organic fertilisers and compost, can lead to wasteful run-off, while damaging plants by encouraging soft, sappy growth.
4) Do you ever use synthetic chemicals (herbicides, fertilisers and fungicides, for example) on soil, grass or paths?
Such chemicals often damage and kill soil organisms, birds and insects, and the run-off can poison water courses.
5) Do you recycle items from the garden that you can't or don't compost?
Fallen leaves make good leafmould; grass cuttings are good mulch. Woody twigs and branches act as plant supports; larger woody branches make firewood, can be shredded or put in a "dead" hedge.
6) Do you grow some food, even just herbs?
Grow what you have space for, as the less you encourage food miles the better and every little helps.
7) Do you use power tools as little as possible?
Petrol driven and electrical tools can make gardening a lot easier but are polluting and use up scarce resources. There's often no practical alternative, but hand shears and push mowers do work.
8) Do you use environmentally-friendly garden materials and furniture?
Wooden garden furniture should be labelled "FSC", which means the timber has been sourced from sustainably managed trees. The wood in unmarked products may have been pillaged from places such as tropical rainforests. Concrete production generates high levels of greenhouse gases and recycled plastic and rubber can be used instead. You can also use eco-friendly wood stain.
9) Do you grow wildlife-friendly plants?
A living garden provides year-round food and shelter for all kinds of wildlife. Flowers should attract pollinators but many modern cultivars don't. Instead of having pollen and nectar, flowers may be "doubles" or have tightly packed heads. Species with useful seedheads are good for birds.
10) Are parts of your garden undisturbed, providing shelter for many different species?
A neatly manicured, lifeless garden offers no boltholes for insects, beetles, hedgehogs or frogs. Wildlife-friendly gardens may have a patch of long grass, a random pile of rotting logs, or a tangled heap of prickly rose prunings tucked away in a corner.
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