The best thing to do for your garden now…spring garden tips and tour

There’s one spring gardening job that saves you time and money later on – and gives your borders the best possible start. In the Spring Garden Tips & Tour, we look at mulching, mistakes and resilient plants.
00:00 Welcome
00:18 Ozzie
00:20 The middle-sized garden – shape, size and climate
00:57 What’s the best thing you can do in your garden in spring
01:30 Companies selling mulch as a byproduct of biofuels include Rocket Gro: https://rocketgro.co.uk/products
01:34 Making compost is easy (really) – video: https://youtu.be/_0fwi_Ix240
03:12 Dealing with perennial weeds in the corner
05:18 A good spring planting combination
06:53 Best place to plant bulbs
07:46 Growing green manure in the veg borders over winter
08:51 Green manure seeds gifted by Thompson & Morgan https://www.thompson-morgan.com/p/green-manure-seeds/gww5301TM
09:29 The front garden mini meadow
10:16 What’s gone wrong in the garden and how to put it right
12:04 Video on perennials that will thrive in both dry and wet summers: https://youtu.be/8Yeihq61_TU
12:20 Video on how to grow daffodils: https://youtu.be/ZqtKfZKqlrI

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Today I’m going to show you the best thing you can do for your Garden in Spring and also what’s working now in the garden and what isn’t and I have made a couple of mistakes so I’m going to go over those so that you don’t have to make them it’s Alexandre here from

The middle-sized Garden YouTube channel and blog and it’s the Spring Garden tips and tour firstly the middle-sized garden is an L-shaped town garden it’s walled and it’s 100 ft long and 80 ft wide at its widest and 40 ft wide near of the house we roughly equate to a US SDA zone

Of 8 or 9 because our Winters are very mild we rarely go below – 6 Celsius 21 Fahrenheit but of course our summers are not usually as hot as an8 or nine however there has been nothing usual about the weather over the last few years and we have had one exceptionally

Hot summer we’ve also had and this is what’s causing the problem in my garden some very wet Winters so let’s start with the best thing you can do in your garden in Spring I’m standing here because you can actually see what we’ve been doing and that’s because the best

Thing you can do for your Garden in Spring is to add a layer of mulch now melt can be garden compost it can be well rotted manure it can be mushroom compost and a lot of people are using the waste material from biofuels that’s not as easy to find as

Simply going to the garden center and getting garden manure but you can actually Google organic waste product from biofuels and you may find someone who can deliver it near you I will see if if I can put some companies in the description below however of course if

You start with your own garden compost a that’s free and B you’re not having to dispose of your garden waste making compost can be really easy and I know people do actually make quite a thing of it but at its most fundamental it’s putting all your garden clippings fruit

And vegetable clippings from the kitchen no cooked food no meat no fish things like newspapers grass clippings all sorts of things piling them into a bin giving them a turn once a week and after about 6 months you will have something absolutely wonderful you can put on your

Soil however the one problem is is that it doesn’t matter whether your garden is Tiny or enormous you will never make enough garden compost for your own use because it really reduces down I mean masses and masses and masses of garden clippings May reduce down into a bit of

Garden compost like this so why is putting a layer of MCH the best thing you can do for your garden at this time of year and the reason for that is you just lie it on top it’s maybe 3 to 5 cm an inch anything just not much and you

Lay it on top all over your borders you don’t have to dig it in the worms and the microorganisms will do that for you and as they do it they will increase the nutrient levels in the soil they will make the actual structure of the soil

Better so that it drains better and it holds water better and of course the layer across the top means that fewer weed seeds germinate so putting a layer of melch on your garden at this time the year means less weeding later on less watering and less fertilizing indeed

Possibly no fertilizing at all so it’s a great time saer and it’s also a money saver from here we go up two steps and onto the outer lawn so let’s have a look at the left hand corner this corner is one we’ve recently changed around because it had a Pera which

Rotted and we took that away and we considered various things and eventually we’ve made it a seating area the thing is that in that time it was very heavily imped Ed with ground Elder so I covered up this area with black Horticultural plastic for a good year in fact and of

Course you have to weed around the edges of the Horticultural plastic because ground Elder and other perennial weeds will poke their way out but it did manage to get rid of most of them but of course even the tiniest little bit of ground Elder will come back so I thought

What can I do so I’m not constantly weeding for ground Elder in this corner so I’ve planted something that many people might think was worse than ground Elder com now but comfrey isn’t worse than ground Elder it is as invasive in some places so you need to check where

You are it does go like the clappers even in this Garden but I’d rather pull out comrey than pull out ground Elder because comfrey is a wonderful source of nectar for bees and pollinators early in Spring it also makes a fantastic fertilizer tea and it can go in the

Compost and putting ground Elder in your compost is a pretty dodgy thing unless you can keep the compost so dark that it rots away before it has any chance to to do any damage but otherwise ground elderen compost is a no no comf and compost yeah great it has got the most

Fantastic nutritional value and I’d always rather pull plants out than put them in so I’m allowing the comfrey to run Riot there is one thing I’ve done here which you shouldn’t do and that is this is a new Young tree and I’ve allowed the comfy to go right up to the

Edges of it I need to pull that out and create what’s called a tree ring because young trees will grow very much better if they don’t have competition immediately around their roots in fact to be honest I quite frequently do pull the comfrey out and but a comfrey I’m

Afraid it grows very fast so let’s walk along the back of the garden to the other Corner because actually that’s quite good at this time of year now before we go to the mistakes let’s just have a look at the things that have worked and I particularly like this

Corner here the white bell-shaped flowers are lucum esum lucum is sometimes called Summer Snow drop I don’t know why because it is a spring flower but it flowers on and on and on this has been here for at least a month and shows no sign of fading away down

Here is a helbor it’s called helor Eric Smithy ey Moonbeam uh it’s a particularly sweet little helor and I think it goes very well with Lamb’s ears Lamb’s ears is or stackus is a plant that is actually very good either in wet or dry conditions I did a video with antique perennial

Asking them for their 10 perennials that were best in both very wet and very dry Summers and Lamb’s ears was one of them and I think with the difficulties we’re all having with the weather at the moment that’s certainly worth thinking about there’s also quite a lot of self-seeded borage and then there’s

Something that is very pretty later on which is SM and perfoliatum perol at Alexander’s now I love it because it looks gorgeous later on in Spring it does get everywhere so before you plant SM perfoliatum you do rather need to check whether it’s actually going to escape into your Countryside and cause

Damage which it can do the thing about invasive plants is that they’re not ever invasive everywhere they will be invasive in certain places so if someone tells you oh this or that plant is invasive what you need to then do is find the rest of the sentence is it

Invasive in your area now this is another area that I think works really well in Spring and these are deciduous trees so they lose their leaves for about 5 months of the year in the summer when they have their leaves the ground directly beneath them is quite shaded and not very much

Grows however in Spring it is a completely Sunny area and all these bulbs absolutely love it and also what I really like is the idea of planting a really sort of showy and impactful group so the rest of the Border can actually be relatively empty because people’s

Eyes go straight to that showy group so you don’t have to have every bit of your Bo B looking great all the time in fact quite a lot of them were planted by my predecessor over 30 years ago so it just shows you bulbs of very good value for

Money you don’t have to plant them every year daffodils go on forever tulips a little bit more difficult this is the veg growing area and what I’ve done with the bare soil of the veg beds over the winter is to grow a green manure now the idea of a green

Manure is that if you leave soil be it attracts weeds and I have actually left one bed be that has got covered in Weeds there are weeds in amongst the green manure because weeds will get in anywhere but there are fewer of them so the green manure say in the Autumn I

Just literally scattered the seeds and raak it up and then about 6 weeks before you’re ready to plant your vegetables you cut the green manure down and you can either dig it in or leave it on top to rot it feeds the soil it creates more nutrition The Roots actually improve the

Structure of the soil and as I say it leaves bare soil covered so you don’t get as many weeds although as I always say weeds will get in everywhere this particular green manure is facila and it has a very beautiful blue flower which is very very attractive to pollinators

So what I think I’ll do with this is to leave a patch of the facila up to flour but the rest of it will need to be chopped down pretty much in the next few days my green manure was gifted by Thompson and Morgan most seed companies

Do have them now but I’ll put a link to that in the description below as you can see however the other problem I have with the veg area is that I’m going to have to keep Aussie off it Aussie loves his fruit and vegetables and he loves

Going out into the garden to find Fallen apples and unless I put some kind of a edging around these beds I am not going to have any fruit or vegetables in the summer in fact I might actually have to turn this into a cutting Garden or a

Cottage Garden because there may be no way of keeping him off off Aussie off off off off off off good boy this is the front mini meow which I’ve been doing for about 3 years and it’s looking really about as good as it ever has looked which just shows you it does take

A while to get these things to work if I’d completely scraped away all the grass and replanted it with Meadow flowers and Bulbs then it could have been achieved in one year but I didn’t want to do that because I’ve got ground nesting bees in the earth in the lawn

And as part of the reason to do the mini Meadows to support Wildlife it doesn’t seem a good idea to disturb the wildlife you’ve got also the ground nesting bees need shorter grass they need access to the soil so they need the lawn to be

Short when they come out which is as I say late summerish so I’ve decided to have it as a Spring Meadow and we’ll start cutting it in Midsummer so now for the mistakes well it’s not so much that they’re mistakes but they’re things that haven’t worked out we replanted this

Border over the last year and I put in things like salvia and agastache which are usually Hardy in this part of of the world and we haven’t actually had a particularly tough winter however both the salvas and the agastache are Twigs or indeed non-existent and I don’t think

That they’re suddenly going to revive the problem is not so much with a cold winter it’s when it’s a cold and wet winter and what has happened both this winter and last is that it’s been an exceptionally wet Autumn it’s completely Soden the soil and then suddenly a cold

Spells come along and it hasn’t been cold compared to some of the cold that all of you know it’s been like Min -5 -3 and it hasn’t lasted very long it’s been a few days but it completely wipes out plants that really don’t like sitting in really cold wet soil hello

What have we got here oh dear come on I think that I’m I am going to replant salvas again they are a fantastic long-lasting flower they’re not I think hard enough for the way we’re getting our winters at the moment the agastache I don’t think that I can make work

Unless we have another couple of very dry years it’s a really good plant for a dry area but at the moment we are a dry area in the summer a very wet area in the winter and it’s just very unpredictable so what can I have instead

Well I think I’ve got enough roses roses are really resilient irises are pretty resilient napita that’s cat mint that’s very good in either hot or dry Summers Sedum which is now called hyot tum or stone crop that’s very good and and of course the grasses are quite resilient

And I could probably use a few more grasses but it does mean that a lot of the plants I planted last year have died I’d say at least a dozen and well that’s gardening it makes a nice gap for something new if you want to know more about daffodils which I think have

Absolutely saved the garden for this spring and so many other Springs then don’t miss this video here and thank you for watching goodbye