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

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 Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and it's the spring garden tips and tour. Firstly the Middlesized Garden is an L-shaped town garden, it's walled and it's 100 feet long and 80 feet wide at its We roughly equate to a USDA zone of 8 or 9 because our winters are very mild, we rarely go below minus 6 Celsius, 21 Fahrenheit, but of course our summers are not usually as hot as an 8 or 9. 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 mulch can be garden compost, it can be well-rutted manure, it can be mushroom compost and a lot of people are using waste material from biofuels. That's not as easy to find as 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 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 six months you will have something absolutely wonderful you can put on your soil. However the one problem 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 mulch the best thing you can do for your garden at this time of year? And the reason for that is you just lay it on top, it's maybe three to five centimeters, 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 mulch on your garden at this time of the year means less weeding later on, less watering and less fertilizing, indeed possibly no fertilizing at all, so it's a great time saver and it's also a money saver. From here we go up two steps and on to 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 pergola 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 infested 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 planted something that many people might think was worse than ground elder, comfrey, 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 comfrey 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 do any damage, but otherwise ground elder in compost is a no-no. Comfrey in 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 comfrey 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, 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 Leucogium estivum. Leucogium is sometimes called summer snowdrop, 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 hellebore, it's called a hellebore Eric Smithii moonbeam. It's a particularly sweet little hellebore and I think it goes very well with lamb's ears. Lamb's ears or stachys is a plant that is actually very good either in wet or dry conditions. I did a video with antique perennials 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 Smyrnium perfoliatum, Perfoliate Alexanders. Now I love it because it looks gorgeous later on in spring. It does get everywhere, so before you plant Smyrnium 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 five 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 border 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 are 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 bare, it attracts weeds and I have actually left one bed bare and that has got covered in weeds. There are weeds in amongst the green manure because weeds will get in anyway, but there are fewer of them. So the green manure, say in the autumn, I just literally scattered the seed and raked it up and then about six 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 phacelia and it has a very beautiful blue flower which is very attractive to pollinators, so what I think I'll do with this is to leave a patch of the phacelia up to flower, 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 Ozzy off it. Ozzy loves his fruit and he loves going out into the garden to find fallen apples and unless I put some kind of edging around these beds, I'm 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 Ozzy, off, off, off, off, off, good boy! This is the front mini meadow which I've been doing for about three years and it's looking 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 meadow is 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 summer-ish, so I've decided to have it as a spring meadow and we'll start cutting it in mid-summer. 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 the world and we haven't actually had a particularly tough winter, however both the salvias 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 sodden the soil and then suddenly a cold spell's come along and it hasn't been cold compared to some of the cold that all of you know, it's been like minus five minus three 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. I think that I am going to replant salvias 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, nepeta, that's catnip, that's very good in either hot or dry summers, sedum which is now called hylotelephium or stone crop, that's very good 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 and so many other springs, then don't miss this video here and thank you for watching, goodbye!