How to turn a small urban garden into both vegetable plot and wildlife haven
At the Green Mole Forum we all have our “Hobby Horse”, mine is bio-diversity and trying to live more in symbiosis with the natural world.
When we moved into our new house one year ago we ended up with a garden that is considerably smaller than our previous one. The silver lining is of course this makes it easier to manage!
The constraints I have to work with are the long and narrow shape of the garden and the main features (railway sleepers, raised bamboo bed, and gravel) that I have decided to retain for the time being, rather than acquire new ones. The only feature we have acquired is a pond – and we went for a pre-formed pool in order to prevent the gravel from tumbling into the pond. I would rather have avoided this as it is fibre-glass but using pond liner was going to be too tricky in this case as the gravel would have kept tumbling in. However, a water hole is important for wildlife but you have to make sure any animal that jumps in has a way to get out again via a ledge. This would also prevent our 16 year old blind cat from drowning if he happens to fall in! So I have commissioned my hubs Matthew to make a “frog ladder” when he next goes to his pottery class. The pond is surrounded by flint we found out on local walks. The flint was transported in our rucksacks by bicycle so we can call it “pretty carbon neutral”.
At the same time we dug the pond out, we decided we would make a vegetable plot. I could have used some of the existing flower beds but suspect they were heavily treated with chemicals, amongst other things slug pellets, so I have decided to allow the soil to recover for a few years and we made a raised bed with non-tarred sleepers instead.
As it was a little too late into the season to seed vegetables, I used the fantastic resource that is Freecycle. Within a couple of days we had several offers of plant seedlings (thanks amongst other donors to a nice Lady who manages one of Bookham’s garden centres). I have tried a bit of companion planting using Marigold which seems to have done its job. Companion plants are plants that help to ward off pests and diseases without the use of chemicals. Here is a link to a site which I found very useful on the subject - list of companion plants - but there are plenty of others.
Of course we also have a compost bin. Our “Dalek” sits at the bottom of the garden and gets fed all the kitchen scraps apart from meat and potato skins. The most important thing for composting is to get a right mix between “greens” e.g. vegetable scraps, grass clippings, weeds and “browns” e.g. cardboard, wood etc. For any information on composting visit the CompostWorks website here.
I have been slightly surprised to find that the previous owners threw everything into their compost bin (like plastics, aluminium, rubber you name it), and bones as well but at least those are organic... These are things one should not compost!!
To encourage the birds we have suspended lots and lots of different bird feeders which seeds for the different species of birds. Feeding helps the birds during cold winters and when they are nesting. A good and popular source of protein are mealworms. To encourage butterflies I planted a Buddleia – the name of the shrub gives it away – one common name is “butterfly bush.
Some fox or other animal dug a hole at the end of the garden and I decided to keep that hole open. It is important for the animals to have corridors that allow them to go from garden to garden. If everybody hermetically seals their gardens, hedgehogs have nowhere to go.
Slugs and snails have been an important feature of our garden this year. I have become quite philosophical with those. I am prepared to share with nature – they left me the Hostas at the beginning of their growing season, especially the ones planted in the gravel! Then they duly perforated them, even probably killed some. BUT if I like birds, hedgehogs and other critters I have to put up with some amounts of pests.
Being French I have even considered eating the snails …. but I am way too concerned about them having eaten those horrible blue snail pellets, many people use so recklessly. They are known for the terrible damage they do throughout the food chain. They will kill birds, cats, dogs (my cousin lost her Bernese mountain dog because he ate some) and so I have no confidence what they would do to us if we were to eat some snails that had eaten some of the stuff – even with garlic!
Which reminds me when is it time to plant garlic?… One of those miracle products of nature, together with honey. There are plenty of good websites to find this kind of information here is one of them. You can even set the weather to your nearest town for frosts etc. so mine is set for Guildford!
Just one last item I wanted to feature. Matt and I are the “wombles of Bookham”. Matt’s really good at DIY. We found these posts and rails in a skip recently and the owner of the stable kindly let us take them out. So we built a bench for our garden. Pictured below.
This is it for the time, Matthew has kindly agreed to give our site its own section for posts related to “green gardening” and encouraging biodiversity. So watch this space!