Using Your Garden to Grow Food

Attempting to grow your own vegetables can be very overwhelming. If the slugs and snails don’t get everything, then something else will. There are, however, some really easy edible plants which don’t take endless time and energy to grow,

Composting Your Waste Away

With the cost of waste removal, there is one very obvious reason for composting your garden waste on-site: it saves you money. If the prospect of composting fills you with dread, it needn’t. Tedious and lengthy descriptions of ‘How to Make the Perfect Compost’ have frightened people away, but there are really two ways to look at compost. The first way is to regard it as a useful and easy way of getting rid of stuff.

Choosing the Right Plants for your garden

One of the attractive things about certain plants is what they, in their turn, attract into the garden. Summer-flowering plants with purple or blue flowers such as Lavender, Catmint or Buddleia are particularly good for bringing in butterflies and bees. Later in the summer, one of the best plants for butterflies and bees is Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, which goes on and on flowering until early winter.For the birds, winter food is important, and plants such as Holly, Ivy, Hawthorn and Elder provide tasty berries, as well as shelter for nesting and perching.

Choosing the right materials for your garden

When designing a garden, it’s a good idea see what materials and plants you might be able to keep. An old fruit tree or a cobbled path can become, when cleaned up, one of a garden’s best assets, and give it an air of maturity. If you have a blank slate, consider your needs first, and work around them. Most people can sum up their needs in a few sentences such as: “somewhere safe for the kids to play” or “we need somewhere to park the car, but also want some screening for the house”.

How Gardens Can Cost the Earth

Many of the plants that we buy have travelled great distances from countries such as Italy, Holland or Belgium. Irish-grown plants have the advantage of being already accustomed to the Irish climate, provide employment locally and come with fewer ‘plant-miles’ behind them. The fad for ‘instant gardens’, where plants are planted as mature specimens, only worsens this, as these larger plants are bulky, need machinery to plant, and are almost exclusively grown abroad.