Sustainable Gardening Ideas - Two

I hope you enjoyed last weeks post about sustainable gardening, here’s a few more ideas to help you. Small steps and we will get there, reducing our carbon footprint and making gardens a more welcoming habitat for all those birds , bees and butterflies that are struggling and endangered.

Echinacea Green Envy and Agastache Black Adder, from Hampton Court Garden Show.

How to use less plastic in your garden:

A difficult one, mainly because of plastic plant pots. There doesn’t seem to be any viable alternative at the moment. I guess growing some of your own plants and re-using plat pots is a good thing to do. It would at least, reduce a few pots in the system, and of course growing your own is a wonderful thing to do in so many ways. Many people have learned this during lock-down.

Plastic plant labels are cheap and compost comes in plastic bags. The best answer seems to be re-using all these items.

Plant labels can be scrubbed with pan-scourers to remove the ink or pencil.

Compost bags are useful, turned inside-out, they’re black and the garish colours are hidden. I store things in them, like leaves, for leaf-mould. I’ve lined a metal basket with a bag to contain the compost, turning it into a plant container.

Ordering loose compost on-line for delivery, a minimum of a cubic metre is usually required. Its’s surprising how much you need when spreading it 3-4in deep as a mulch. Even better, you could order more and share it with neighbours.

The benefits of plants with single flowers:

Plants that help the wildlife in our gardens is a huge topic, so I’ll return to it in future posts.

This time it’s about single flowers, I don’t mean planting them individually! I’m talking about those flowers with a single row of petals, making the pollen and nectar is easy to get to, rather than flowers with a frilly ruff. Although, don’t discount flowers with frills because there are so many beautiful ones. Just make sure there are enough single ones in your garden, preferably all year round.