What's new, what's growing, what we're learning. Updates, guides and stories for people who take their garden seriously.
Your winter prunings are fencing material: willow rods strike root and turn into a living fence, hazel poles stay dead and last 5 to 10 years as a weave, brushwood becomes a Benjes hedge. Weaving technique, cutting season CW 46 to 9, service life honestly counted, and what neighbour law has to say about it.
Grasses plus low, tread tolerant flowers: white clover, daisies, creeping thyme, selfheal. Four to six cuts a year at 6 to 8 cm, no feed, no scarifying. How to sow a flowering lawn from scratch or overseed it into the sward you already have.
Why ivy is the last bee pasture of the year, when its berries ripen, and what is really true about the wall-damage myth.
Sow a flowering cover crop after harvest and you protect the soil while filling the late-summer nectar gap for bees.
It isn't the missing hedgehog house that kills hedgehogs, but robot mowers, slug pellets and open shafts. Here is how to really help in autumn.
Entrance hole size down to the millimetre, an easterly aspect, and the autumn clean-out: this is how your nest box actually gets occupied come spring.
How to plant a layered wild hedge from native shrubs this autumn, giving birds nesting sites, cover and food all year round.
From the bird-feeder debate to a living pantry: how to support birds all year with clean food, water, and native berry shrubs.
Why bumblebees are already flying in March, which blooms carry them through the spring gap, and how to build a home for them all year.
