The 2020 gardening season

And so it begins, the 1st of March,*sigh*, I’ve officially kicked off my gardening season!



This year’s journey for me is going to focus on things I can do to help and improve biodiversity in my garden.

Are you doing anything interesting for your ‘bit’ to help nature this year? What are you planting or doing? Any tips you’d like to share?

Any inspirational photos from your garden you’d like to share throughout this year?

There’s something so therapeutic about sowing seeds, just spending some time in quiet contemplation, giving yourself time and space to indulge in your thoughts in this busy life!

Here’s my first offering this year to add to my wildlife garden.



Included are yarrow, purple pin cushion, native foxgloves, agastache, salvia and bee’s no 1 favorite vipers bugloss. All seeds from seedaholic website. I try to go organic if there’s an option.

Harry Palmr

I'm going to create a dedicated pollinator section this season, it will be small, suburban back gardens being what they are. It won't be properly up and running until next summer in all likelihood. The other project is proper veg growing. I've got two beds in place and will sow in the next month.

magicbastarder

re biodiversity - dig a pond, if you have space for one.
we've done quite a bit of wild gardening, in a back garden which is approx 38' x 80', so we've a good amount of space.

main work which will be occupying me in the next month or two is pruning back overgrown trees.

Reckless Abandonment

Wildlife pond (never got around to it over the winter) definitely plan on planting more bee friendly flowers. And more evergreen trees (conifers etc) really notice this winter how little structure my garden has when the leaves drop.

Harry Palmr

I have a mature conifer on the SE corner of the garden and really wish I didn't - fecking thing is a real light hog until lunchtime. If you plant remember to do so on the north side of your plot - annoy the neighbour instead of robbing yourself of sun.

uck51js9zml2yt

Ground is too soft for me to get in s tractor with a plough. At least another month for me to get going

It’s always been my dream to have a pond, but with little ones running around it’s something I’m sadly putting on hold for a few years. Ah well gives me time to plan it lol

scarepanda

SnowyMuckish wrote: »

It’s always been my dream to have a pond, but with little ones running around it’s something I’m sadly putting on hold for a few years. Ah well gives me time to plan it lol

You could try fence it off? We had a deep enough pond in the garden growing up and dad put sheets of mesh, what they use for large concrete areas, around it and it's still in place 30 years later. There's a shallow pond at the house we're buying and I'm planning on leaving it there and putting up a timber fence around it to keep the two kids away from it.

macraignil

Harry Palmr wrote: »

I have a mature conifer on the SE corner of the garden and really wish I didn't - fecking thing is a real light hog until lunchtime. If you plant remember to do so on the north side of your plot - annoy the neighbour instead of robbing yourself of sun.

How about cutting it down?



Could make some good firewood by next winter.


Might also give you space for something that wont block light as much in winter like a deciduous tree of some sort.

baaba maal

SnowyMuckish wrote: »

It’s always been my dream to have a pond, but with little ones running around it’s something I’m sadly putting on hold for a few years. Ah well gives me time to plan it lol

Get some steel reinforced mesh (the rigid steel grid you put into a concrete slab to strengthen it). Sit it over the pond (with a piece of steel to brace it if the pond is large). The mesh allows people to see in to the pond and the plants to grow normally.

I'm not a fan of fencing off ponds- timbers can rot, gates can be left open accidentally etc.)- this solution allows a pond with complete piece of mind.

looksee

I have a new garden of about an acre. At the moment it has quite a lot of decent if boring grass and quite a lot of trees. Unfortunately many of the trees are sycamores and horse chestnuts, so some serious thinning of those will happen. Also some nice ash trees, alders, silver birch, fruit trees (some of dubious fruitfulness) willows that don't look too healthy and a few decorative trees. I hope to take out some of the sycamore and horse chestnuts and replace with other native trees, though generally not huge specimens, more silver birch, mountain ash etc, and create a more woodland effect in about half the area, with more varied underplanting than grass.

There is rough grass (with lots of bulbs) that is a bit bocketty in a couple of places but I am going to try and work with it rather than fight it, put shrubs and plants in that will look after themselves. Producing the clear soil tidiness of an urban garden is not possible or desirable. There are two smallish areas (each about the size of a small urban back garden!) that are out of control and I am getting in a digger to sort them - they would be beyond the hand digging approach and it will make the entrance to the site more civilised. There is a lot of work to do, including some hard landscaping around the house that is very scruffy, it will be a job of several years. It has potential to be very nice.

I think the approach with the trees will be to put in one more mature (ie expensive) tree to define an area then surround it with a little group of bare root smaller versions - I can get 5 or 6 4ft whips for the price of a more mature potted tree. They will not take long to catch up and in the mean time I can see progress

All we need now is some reasonable weather!

You could make a lovely log pile with the trees you cut. Our back garden backs onto farmland, I made a little pile of logs in a corner at the boundary, rough grass took over and I soon forgot about it. Then one evening I got the shock of my life when I walked outside to see this little guy!!



So that inspired me to bug my other half to build to hog house for under our decking.



It fascinates me that there’s a whole world out there separate from our own, going about their business unbeknownst to us.

There’s nothing more that I love now than a morning coffee and a stroll around the back to see their little tracks or sitting with a glass of wine on our deck during summer nights and watching them roam my veg patch!

If you build it they will come!:)

looksee

looksee wrote: »

At the moment it has quite a lot of decent if boring grass ....

There is rough grass (with lots of bulbs) that is a bit bocketty in a couple of places but I am going to try and work with it rather than fight it

Our garden is one of to halves, the front is my OH’s pride a joy, obsessed with the ‘perfect’ show house lawn. He cuts it nearly twice a week. The back is my domain, he has reluctantly let me let it ‘go’ a bit. It gets cut less, and only half at a time so the clover etc can regenerate and they’re not all completely wiped out for the bees. We’re going to scarify the lawns in the next week or two and I plan to add these to my ‘patch’.



For the rough grass things that worked for me along our boundary were yarrow, cow parsley, wild carrot, poppy, thistle and scabious. (From the seedaholic website) They are always absolutely covered in all sorts of insects. They create such a beautiful light, ethereal feeling when you walk along as the light fades in the evenings. So beautiful!

Harry Palmr

macraignil wrote: »

How about cutting it down?



Could make some good firewood by next winter.


Might also give you space for something that wont block light as much in winter like a deciduous tree of some sort.

I've thought about it but I regard the tree as my personal carbon sink! We'll see.

Seems like a lifetime ago since I planted these lupins. Still, it’s nice to see the hope of new beginnings, if only to distract me for a little while!

Monty Don and Gardeners World back again tomorrow! Can’t wait for Monty, he is the most calming and relaxing person on the planet. Pure escapism, exactly what’s needed now.

SnowyMuckish

SnowyMuckish wrote: »

Monty Don and Gardeners World back again tomorrow! Can’t wait for Monty, he is the most calming and relaxing person on the planet. Pure escapism, exactly what’s needed now.

Looking forward to it too!
Shame the chelsea flower show is canceled but we all knew that was coming and rightly so.

GreeBo

I love lupin leaves...not mad on the flowers themselves though!

GreeBo

I have 6 mature apple trees of various varieties and 4 old pear trees, other than 3 apple trees, they are all espaliered against walls.
I also have a mature fig and some gooseberry bushes.

This year I have added sweet & sour cherry, plum, strawberry, raspberry and blackberry, so hoping for a good crop!
Garden is south facing so gets a lot of sun, now that it has appeared above the mature conifers on the land behind!

I have thrown down some wild flower seeds in one area and added some ferns for interesting shade.

Finally I spent last weekend planting bulbs of various varieties, so was a bit disappointed to wake up to a sharp frost this morning, fingers crossed they all survive.

Around the front I have a couple of skimmia ready to go into the ground and some small buxus to make a little hedge to surround them.

Other than that, the enforced time at home is making for lots of garden maintenance work (grass edging, scarifiing, overseeding, path cleaning, etc!)

I also have a large old compost heap that needs a good turning.

Yeah The lupin leaves are really lovely, I think the flowers are great for height and structure but everyone has their own favorites :-)
This year was the first year that I was contemplating going to Chelsea but just isn’t to be!

GreeBo

SnowyMuckish wrote: »

Yeah The lupin leaves are really lovely, I think the flowers are great for height and structure but everyone has their own favorites :-)

They are good for height and do look good, but I just feel that they start to look very tatty when the flowers start to die off.

True! I’m trying to replicate a planting scheme that I saw last year, the two tone purple/white lupins were planted with six hills giant catmint, it was a stunning combination!

I have two homemade north facing planters at the front of our house. I had roses in them for two years, failed both years. So I was planning on adding ivy, foxgloves as the the main feature supported by astilbe and ferns. I looked online for ivy. €10 for 2 plants plus €10 delivery, crazy! Went scrounging behind some wild fuchsia bushes and pulled some out. Hopefully it’ll take root. Probably not the best combination, ivy vs moisture loving astilbe and ferns. Still, the fun is in The experimenting!

Lovely to see these ladies back this spring. They’ve been flying around all week, found this one in my bathroom this evening!

Plenty of queen bees about today. Had a go at identifying some.

Great resource to have a go: https://pollinators.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Crash-course-in-bumblebee-identification_2018.pdf great fun to keep the kids occupied!

Bombus lucorum, so beautiful!



Native honey bee I think?



Honeybee nests. Lovely to watch them come and go.

Things are slowly moving on with my new pollinator friendly flowers. I spent the day potting on a lot of the seedlings.

Copper taped my lupins from the slugs.


But they should be fine, since I have a family of these little guys to help me out!


This poor little thing was out earlier today while I was gardening, it must have come out due to thirst? so I left it a little bowl of water. Hopefully it’ll be okay!

After watching Gardeners World last night, Frances Tophill did a piece about the 75% decline of flying insects over the last 26years. So with that in mind I thought I’d share a little update of my wildlife friendly garden.







In the photos you can see some bee favorite flowers that I’ve planted this year.
Vipers Bugloss, borage, geraniums and lupins. If you’d like to try any of these yourself I got the seeds from seedaholic. I always try to go organic as much as I can. We also left a section of our lawn to go wild this year.