I moved into this house recently and it has a huge amazing garden, I have been working the past few days clearing everything and getting the ‘bones’ ready to make an amazing native wild garden. I’m not really a newbie but have a lottt to learn.
My main goals are to create a herb garden, vegetable patch and plant lots of wildflower seeds to create a meadow around the borders to attract pollinators and promote wildlife.
For a bit of context, we have 3 foxes that live in the garden and it is south facing. I’ve added pictures of the progress so far 🙂 also the budget is basically keeping to a minimum but there’s loads of wood and bits to make stuff.
All advice welcome! How to make DIY borders, raised beds, seed varieties, easy ish fruits and herbs.
by Tricky_Examination57
5 Comments
A pond is really valuable, even small ponds can be really useful for biodiversity relative to their size (as long as the edges are gently sloping or wildlife can otherwise safely get out)
Great. Use some of the ‘wood and bits’ to make a compost bin and fill it up with all the leaves and grass.
Put your herb garden in a raised bed if you want it to be safe (ish) from the wildlife. For the wildlife:
• Designate a small section to just be a wild mess for wildflowers and other seeds to germinate
• If you have any logs/sticks, make a pile and leave it for various things to live in
• Add a pond (either a dug one with a liner, formed pond basin, or just a big plant tub sunk into the ground) with pond plants and ways for animals to climb out
• Plant native wildflowers in dug beds, you can add edges to the beds or just let them sprawl out on the grass
• Minimise how much grass you have! Leave some if you like it, but mown lawns are an ecological dead zone…
Herbs will need full sun and are best close the house for ease of gathering, the veg patch probably is best close too. Some will need good drainage and you’re best off looking at crop rotation methods and possibly going no dig or using raised beds.
A real meadow isn’t made with wildflower seeds; it’s from the various species that are endemic to an area. You need a blend of perennials, biennials and annuals which can take 10/15+ years to turn a lawn into a wildflower meadow. People like to use ‘wildflower mixes’ but the majority are not offering much for wildlife.
You’re better off gathering things that are considered traditionally as weeds but are the very things pollinators evolved to recognise and utilise. Dandelions (key food source for emerging queen bees), borage (one of the fastest replenishing source of nectar) ragwort and thistles (which are amongst the best sources of nectar and pollen). Add in teasels, echiums, foxgloves, mullein and angelica for height and various flowering shapes which attract in various sized pollinators.
Create a space for ground nesting bees; only a limited number of species actually use ‘bug hotels’ so things like bare soil and old stone walls and even exposed sand is used for various mining bees. I used a wool mulch and even though it wasn’t that effective at suppressing weeds, it was used by a colony of bees.
For the excess wood using it as a dead hedge is an excellent thing to have in a garden as you’ve created a habitat for decomposers. There was an especially good recent gardeners world episode which had an excellent example that would put many Botanic Gardens to shame.
Plant a large tree in your garden, something like an oak/beech (there’s tons of cultivars) and companion plant it with some hedgerow plants to mimic a native hedgerow.
That gives me flashbacks, I filed a skip with bamboo roots from two well establish large clumps, even with a mattock it was heavy going. Took about a week in all.
Can you take a look over the fences, that’s a well established patch. if you can’t see anything in the neighbour gardens then likely you’re fine. I think even clumping can still send the odd runner.
When I dug mine out, I kept getting shoots from any bits of root still buried. After 12 months of cutting any fresh shoots down it was pretty much gone. The roots only have so much energy, keep cutting the shoots and it can’t recharge.