Time to tidy!

My compost bins have worked very well since we started them a few years ago. I built three bins with slatted fronts that can be removed to take out the contents, on an earth base. They are sited under a thick Privet hedge, so stay quite dry for most of the year, but we do cover them with old pieces of carpet once they are full, to stop the compost becoming a soggy mess! Our local garden centre sells an activator and we add this to the layers every so often to speed up the rotting process. The bins are turned once a year and all of the rotted compost is used as mulch on the borders. I don’t think you can put too much mulch on borders; it helps to keep down weeds, conditions the soil without the need to dig and also helps to seal in moisture if applied after the spring rains. Mulch, mulch and mulch again as someone once wrote in a gardening column!

As well as garden waste, which needs to be chopped into small lengths if it is in any way ‘woody’, we add all of our vegetable peelings from the kitchen, shredded papers and some of the ash from the wood burner. Chicken manure and wood shavings are also added when I clean out my bantams and saw dust from cutting up logs rots down really well. 

This year, I am going to site a couple more water butts to save carrying water from our one outdoor tap to the outlying areas of the garden! The garden shed roof is a good place to start, so I need to put up some guttering to channel the rain off that. I may tap into one of the down pipes from the house roof in the front garden as well.

When the weather has been so wet, there seems little point thinking about saving water, but there is usually a dry spell at some point in the spring or summer and planted containers and hanging baskets don’t take long to dry out once they are established!

We have a very dry border near to the house in the back garden and planted a climbing Honeysuckle (Lonicera) there with an ornamental grape vine. Neither thrived to begin with; the Honeysuckle was always getting mildew and bad attacks of aphid, a sure sign that the plant was under stress. We decided to lay some leaky pipe irrigation around the base of the plants and during dry weather, crack the outdoor tap and leave it on for a few hours a couple of times a week. The improvement in the plants’ health has been amazing and last summer, the Honeysuckle was full of golden yellow flowers that contrasted beautifully with the claret purple leaves of the grape vine. Once I have tidied the Border Cranesbills (Geranium) that grow under the climbers, I will top dress the area with pelleted chicken manure and mulch to save as much valuable moisture as I can!

Mr McGregor

Early Colour

The mild weather has meant that many plants are beginning to flower earlier than usual in our garden. We have already had the ‘Rinjveld’s Early Sensation’ Daffodils  flowering in November and now my Lenten Roses (Helleborus x hybridus) are rearing their beautiful heads, crowning the handsome deep green leaves below. We have a particularly striking apple green seedling that is covered in strong bud branches and about to show off the freckled flowers with matching fluffy stamens that complete the picture.

 All this activity has encouraged me to begin tidying up my borders, although I am wary that we could still get a spell of hard weather. At the moment, plants are suffering from wind scorch on their unseasonally soft growth rather than frost damage, which has been the case for the past three winters! Tender plants such as Penstemon and hardy Fuchsias may look scruffy but all of the old growth will need to remain for another month or two if I can bear it! Never the less, the borders are taking on a different feel as the green shoots of Daffodils and Snowdrops begin to pierce through the soil, along with the perennials  Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, Hemerocallis (Day Lilies) and Pulmonaria ‘Blue Ensign’. Pulmonarias are such useful plants for shade and early colour – often starting to flower in January and February, when there is usually very little apart from evergreens to give interest.

Evergreens are the furniture of the garden and still give the most interest at the moment. The Myrtle (Luma) that I planted as a cutting from my grandmother’s garden years ago is now a huge tree. The tiny, deep green leaves are very wind proof and the bark is now mature enough to take on a beautiful cinnamon colour despite the local cats using it as a scratching post! Of course, plants that are known as ‘semi evergreen’ such as Abelia and shrubby winter flowering Honeysuckles have also kept their leaves because of the mild weather and we even have a semi evergreen climbing Honeysuckle Lonicera ‘Halliana’, in flower! The Hebes in the front garden have made pleasing, evergreen mounds and one has fluffy white flower clusters, which are more usually out in late summer, when they attract butterflies and moths.

 My Miscanthus grasses have looked amazing all winter; their leaves and stems bleached out to faded browns and the skeletons of the feather duster flowers hung on until the last vicious gale that we had stripped them bare. There are already plenty of new shoots coming up from the ground, so I have removed the old growth and chopped it up into short lengths for the compost heap.

One of the bins is ready to be turned and the compost closest to the base is rotted enough to use as mulch over any bare soil as I tidy the borders. This really does help to keep the weeds down and will help to protect my Crocosmia clumps if hard weather does threaten the soft shoots that are appearing. 

Mr McGregor

Berried Treasure

I do love this time of the year as the garden (and gardeners!) begins to slow down for a welcome rest through the winter months before the hectic spring rush comes around all too quickly once again! Now I have time to look back over the past year at successes and failures and start to plan what will be done differently in the future.

Pyracantha Orange GlowThe garden has become a treasure box of berries as evergreens and fruits take centre stage now that the chaos of the overblown summer borders are being cut back for the autumn tidy up. Despite clocking every piece of ‘berried treasure’ in our garden, the Blackbirds and Thrushes have not yet had their feast, so Mrs McGregor and I can enjoy the jewel like colours for a while longer! The Pyracantha (Fire Thorn) on our fence in the back garden had bad frost damage after last winter and has not flowered at all so no berries, but the one on the front of the house is smothered in clusters of ripe orange ones, that contrast well with the brown stone of the house walls. Perhaps the activity of people at the front of the house will deter the birds – I doubt it somehow once the colder weather begins! We do not begrudge the birds their food source that is essential if they are to ‘fuel up’ before the cold winter weather ahead.

Some of my favourite autumn plants are the Cotoneasters and we have a handsome evergreen shrub of Cotoneaster x rothschildianus with yellow berries and long, leathery leaves. As well as giving colour and interest through the year, this is an ideal shrub to give us and our neighbour privacy from each other. It really has done well in part shade and quite dry soil, making a dense bush.

Another plant that is looking really good at the moment is our Abelia which is smothered in clusters of pink flowers, much appreciated by the bees. Although the plant does not have berries, to my mind it is one of the best shrubs for late summer and autumn flowers and such as easy doer.

This week I have emptied the compost bins and bagged up the well rotted compost to use as mulch on the borders as I tidy them for the winter. The gales of wind that we had have broken several of my herbaceous plants so these have been cut back to a few inches above the crowns and the chopped stems used to begin the composting process again. Mrs McGregor has been busy tidying out some old papers which she has shredded and added as well. These seem to rot down in no time and make a good airy layer between the garden and kitchen waste.

As well as the plants in our garden, the hedgerows are full of berries and we have been busy picking sloes to make sloe gin ready for the festive season – a real winter warmer!

Mr McGregor

Be Green Go Peat Free

If peat-based composts had to have warning labels, like cigarettes, more people would think twice about buying them - having something in your trolley labelled "Harvesting this peat destroyed a valuable wildlife habitat" would become as much of a social faux pas as dolphin-unfriendly tuna.

But peat composts don't have to be labelled as such, and so it's up to gardeners to look for composts that are 'peat-free' if they want to be green. It's easy enough to forget in the spur of the moment, but perhaps if we knew a little bit more about peat then it would be easier to remember.

Peat is a special kind of soil, formed when sphagnum moss (for the main part) rots down very slowly in acid, waterlogged conditions. It therefore only occurs in peat bogs and fens, which are rich wildlife habitats that support a variety of plants and animals that only thrive in these circumstances.

Peat bogs form at the rate of about one millimetre every year, which is roughly the thickness of a paper clip. If you dig down a metre you're digging into a thousand years of history, and peat bogs often preserve archaeological treasures.

Although peat bogs only cover around 3% of Earth's surface, they store as much carbon (in the decayed moss) as all of the world's forests put together. When the peat is dug up, dried out and processed into compost, all of that carbon is released. If we stopped using peat in our gardens we could keep all that carbon in the ground, and be well on the way to reducing our carbon emissions to manageable levels and preventing the worst effects of climate change.

Peat has only really been used in gardening since the 50s, when everything was standardized and mechanized and people came to expect every bag of potting compost to be exactly the same. The advantages of peat here are that it is sterile and stable, but it is very low in nutrients, and so those have to be added to the potting compost.

In recent times there has been a lot of investment in peat-free composts. Many of these are made from waste products (bark, or even garden waste that has been collected), and are far more environmentally-friendly that peat-based composts. It's true that some are better than others for particular purposes, so if you have tried one and found that you didn't get good results then try another brand.

While you're getting used to peat-free compost you'll need to keep an eye on your feeding and watering regime, as peat-free composts hold water and nutrients differently to peat-based composts. But once you've got the hang of that, your green fingers will really be green!

Emma Cooper is a freelance garden writer, based in Oxfordshire. She's been gardening without peat for over ten years, and if you'd like to know more about avoiding the use of peat in the garden you can read her new book 'The Peat-Free Diet' online at http://emmacooper.org/peat-free-diet.

At Notcutts we are supportive of the Government target for amateur growing media products to be peat free by 2020 and are playing an active role towards this.

By doing so we have proudly achieved ‘Full Member’ status of the Growing Media Initiative (GMI) following a recent audit of the bagged growing media we sell to the public.

In the Garden

Not only have I been busy on the allotment, I have also been taking time out over the bank holidays and weekends in the garden. I have been training Mrs McGregor’s roses, redecorating her craft den, maintaining the containers and borders and getting out my garden furniture. However, after all that hard work I noticed the lawn is looking a little worse for wear; I should have paid more attention to it while I was tending to the borders.

It’s time for some damage control to get my lawn looking healthy; I believe there is nothing better than a luscious green lawn, but with winter just gone and the sun being quite hot, my lawn is looking far from a thing of beauty. We haven’t been getting a lot of rain over the past couple of months either, leaving my garden looking quite bare. Lawns tend to usually bounce back after a good shower, so a good watering with the hose is in order.

Mowing and trimming the lawn is becoming a regular activity for me in the garden as grass naturally grows more vigorously when the weather is warm. After mowing I have always found it best to rake up the thatch from cast away clippings and put them into the compost bin; having those nutrients will really help create a healthy compost you can put back into the garden (but if you have treated the lawn, don’t put the clippings with the other compost material).

However, I will also have to feed to lawn with a summer feed to promote a lush green colour and scatter grass seeds for an even ground cover. When I asked Mrs McGregor to fetch some feed from the garage she gave me what we had left over in the autumn feed, good thing I checked the label before distributing it across the lawn! There is a great deal of a difference between the two; an autumn feed contains nitrogen that will encourage vegetative growth over the cold months, whereas a summer feed will help the grass regain its lush green colour.

I have also found that the key to a great looking lawn is all in the aeration; to do this pierce the lawn with a garden fork or aerator, this will encourage invigorating and energetic gardening activity, which alleviates compaction.  

Mr McGregor