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.
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.
Have you noticed a slight autumn chill in the mornings?
The next post is about what to do in the garden in September, when autumn will have to be mentioned. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the last days of Summer.
More about sustainable gardening in this post.
Look after yourselves and enjoy your garden.
Jill
all photos; Jill Anderson.
Leave a Reply