Sustainable gardening – autumn tips
As we progress into autumn, it’s a good time to introduce more sustainable garden practice that will benefit our soils and the wildlife visiting our garden. Resist the urge to cut back spent herbaceous material, and instead leave it standing through the winter, helping to protect our soils from erosion and creating pockets of plant material that beneficial bugs and insects can overwinter in. Thicker areas of spent herbaceous material will offer protection or hibernation options too for voles, field mice, toads, maybe even hedgehogs.
Seeds from the plant material will feed birds going into the winter and also perhaps self-seed in situ thereby giving us fuller clumps of plant material next year, helping to cover the soil surface more thoroughly and remove the need to weed our borders. More plants = more pollinators so it’s good for us and for our visiting wildlife. Beneficial bugs and insects such as ladybirds, beetles, hoverfly and lacewings will overwinter in standing dead herbaceous material and will feed on our unwanted pests in the coming year. There’s no need for insecticides. Let nature do the work for you, it’s designed for the job and much more efficient! It’s just a case of tweaking our usual garden maintenance routine. The line I hate to hear the most is ‘putting the garden to bed for winter’ because it usually means cutting, clearing, tidying away all these potential habitats for our gardening partners.
I understand the desire to look out onto neat and tidy borders that will stay that way for a few months in winter, (whereas in summer they demand attention every 2 or 3 weeks to keep that tidy look) but, once we learn about the garden ecosystem and how important shelter and food in the winter is to all wildlife, it looses it’s appeal to tidy for winter and instead strikes one as soul-less and unnatural. If you haven’t gardened this way before, I urge you to try it this winter. Enjoy the frost settling on the standing seed heads, the winter low light shining through swaying plant material. In late spring, when the weather begins to warm, tidy if necessary ready to plant for the coming season. You may find there is very little to tidy away because much of it will have rotted down naturally over the winter, acting as a free mulch, feeding the soil and protecting it over the winter. Such good sustainable garden practice!
I've just attended the first Yeo Valley Garden Festival. So many inspiring speakers including some presenters from Gardeners World, and other expert horticulturalists. I was reassured to know that what I teach and what I practice in terms of sustainable garden practice is very much the way forward for our gardens, but I also learnt a lot more! There were a few ‘stand out’ tips which I will share with you over the next couple of columns.
Arit Anderson spoke about sustainable gardens by asking us to recognise whether our gardens would rot down, or what would remain of it after 100 years? If the next owners of our gardens were to dismantle our garden, how much would have to go to landfill? This is a great tip for making us more aware of how much permanent hard landscaping is in our gardens, all of which is detrimental to a natural environment by preventing excess rainfall from soaking into our soils and instead adding to the amount of water running into our drains, overwhelming sewers, washing away road surfaces to cause potholes, not to mention how hard landscaping suffocates soil life and reduces opportunities to plant for pollinators. It’s a good one to keep in mind when planning projects in our gardens.
Arit also spoke about the importance of ‘connecting with neighbours’ in a garden context. We might be lucky enough to have keen wildlife gardeners on either side of us, but more likely we have only one or none. If we are passionate about encouraging wildlife into our gardens, the first and best way to ensure we are successful is to try to get our immediate neighbours on board with the idea too. The more habitats that are available to wildlife, the more likely they are to visit, and hopefully breed in your garden. An ‘oasis in a wilderness’ is unlikely to succeed so see how amenable your neighbours are to opening up the connectivity between yours and their gardens, for instance for hedgehogs by making a small hole in fencing to allow a visiting hedgehog to travel through both gardens (or more).
By looking at what your neighbours have in their gardens, you can make better decisions about what to include in your garden. For instance, if your neighbour has a large pond, there is no need for you to have one too, as theirs will be catering for pond loving wildlife for both of your gardens. If your neighbours cut their grass very short all year round, you can compliment that by allowing yours to grow longer for wildlife, and yours will serve both gardens (or more) by varying the habitats available to wildlife. If your neighbour has planted lots of evergreen foliage plants, you can compliment that by planting deciduous trees and shrubs to enable leaf litter habitats, and also by planting lots of bright flowers to bring in pollinators. If your garden differs from your neighbours, that’s a good thing, as both gardens combined will bring in a variety of wildlife. The key to you both benefiting from each other’s habitats is ‘connectivity’. Can wildlife travel between your gardens? Are there ground level openings to allow a through path? Are there ‘safe tunnels’ where wildlife can pass between without becoming exposed to predators such as birds of prey, cats etc. Food for thought.