Gardening for beginners easy tips and simple explanations

If you're new to gardening, this video brings together some of the Middlesized Garden's best videos on practical gardening advice. We'll cover how to choose plants, how to understand sunlight in your garden, a simple explanation of what the different plant types are, the gardening tools you need, how to weed and how to garden so that you can be environmentally and wildlife friendly. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and let's start Several different friends and family have moved into a house with a garden for the first time this year and they've rung me and said what shall I do? And the first thing I've said is do nothing. Take a chair out into the garden and sit there and see where the sun falls and look at what you've got and what you like and what you don't like. Move the chair around the garden. Even in the smallest garden it can look very different if you sit by the house and look out at the garden or you take the chair to the end of the garden and look back at the house. Make a list of what you've actually got lawn, terrace, path, trees, shrubs, a shed, greenhouse. What have you already got? And then make a list of what you want from your garden. Do you want it as a place to entertain friends? Is it going to be a family play place? Do you want to grow veg? Is it important to have flowers all year round? Once you've got a goal in life, you can aim for it and that's why it's really important with your garden is to decide what your goal is and aim for it. Then the first practical thing I would suggest is learn to identify your weeds. If you don't know what weeds grow locally to you, ask a knowledgeable friend or pay a gardener to come around the garden for about an hour, maybe two or three times over the spring and summer and then take a photograph of the weeds on your phone or find some other way of identifying them. In the 20 years I've been gardening in this garden I've tried lots of different kinds of weeding and I promise you there is no substitute for hand weeding that's pulling plants out by hand. I did try using glyphosate sprays but the trouble with sprays is that you always damage the nearby plants that you want to keep. It's so fiddly that it actually doesn't save you any time and the effects don't last any longer. There are a few things that you can do to minimize weeds in your garden and the most important of these is mulching and that's adding a layer of garden compost, well-rotted manure, bark chips or similar over your borders. It deprives the weeds of the light they need to grow, it won't get rid of all your weeds, nothing will get rid of all your weeds, but it will mean you have fewer weeds. If you have a whole border that you're prepared not to plant up for a whole summer and it's really full of weeds, then one really effective thing you can do is to cover it with a light excluding mulch such as a black horticultural membrane or even cardboard and this means that the weeds won't grow for a whole summer and that will really knock a lot of perennial weeds out. You will still have to hand weed around the edges because they creep out and even when you replant the border, you'll have a lot fewer weeds but there will be still one or two popping up, but of course it'll be much less work to weed them out. The third thing you can do is to be much more tolerant of what plants you're happy to have in your garden and which ones you do really want to get rid of and one of the things we've done is to allow certain plants to grow in the cracks between our pavers so that weeds can't grow there and so I've got daisies and alchemilla mollusk and I would really like some erigeron as well and they are growing in the cracks around the steps and in the pavers and that means we have much less weeding to do. There is a new attitude to weeds at the moment which is that actually they are wild flowers and that a weed is only a plant in the wrong place and for example Jack Wallington, author of a book called Wild About Weeds Designing with Rebel Plants, would say that actually weeds grow very well in your garden, they're beautiful, they attract wildlife and that we should be more tolerant of them and I think this is a very good approach but until you can decide which weeds you want in your garden you'll need to know which are considered weeds. Many people worry that if they let their gardens get weedy then that will infect their neighbor's gardens with weeds but that factor is relatively small. Weeds are blown in on the wind or dropped to seeds by birds from actually miles around, so don't worry about that too much and also if your neighbor's garden is weedy, don't feel that that's what's causing your weeds. The next thing to work out is where is the sun and how much do you have? In theory all gardens will have at least one sunny border, one very shady border and two parts sun and part shade, but of course gardens can be irregular shapes, they don't necessarily run north to south or east to west, however you can't really change the aspect of your border. You can make a sunny border a bit more if there's a tree in it and you cut it down, but if you cut a tree down in a shady border, a north facing border, you're actually not going to create much more sun, so it's important to see where the sun falls in your garden and how long it's there for. Any border that has six hours or more of full sun is called a sunny border and plants that need sunny borders will thrive there. Borders that have maybe three to six hours of sun are called partly shaded and you can probably experiment with what plants do well there. If your border is north facing and has a high wall or fence, it's going to be a very shady border, but don't despair, a shady border can be the best and most beautiful part of your garden. There are a number of plants that do really well in shady conditions and also they tend to grow more slowly and weeds grow more slowly, so a shady border can be wonderfully low maintenance. So once you know which parts of your garden are sunny and which are shady and which are partly shaded, you can choose the right plants for that amount of sunshine because it really does matter to put the plants in the places they want to go. Plants will forgive you an awful lot, but they won't really forgive you the wrong amount of sun. One thing you will see on many lists of basic gardening tips is that you should test your soil and if you're good with sort of instructions and kits and jam jars and things like that, it is a really good piece of advice because you will find out exactly what your soil is made of. But the fact of the matter is that most gardeners don't test their soil, they learn which plants do well by trial and error, by just planting things and seeing what goes well. The easiest way to find out what sort of soil you have is probably just to ask your neighbors. There can be patches of different soil, particularly in larger gardens, for example at Doddington Place Gardens, which is largely clay, they discovered in the early 1920s that was a big patch of acidic soil and they've created a camellia garden with rhododendrons and azaleas and all sorts of things that thrive in acid soils which don't usually thrive around here, but in smaller gardens you're less likely to have those little patches of unusual soil. However, there is one basic tip about soil that you do need to know, whatever your soil is like, you need to mulch it and what that means is that you layer an inch or two of garden compost, well rotted manure or mushroom compost on it once a year, often in autumn or you can do it in spring or really you can do it at any time. What this does is it feeds the soil, it helps suppress annual weeds and it gives the soil the nutrition it needs so that it can feed your plants. However, what is a must-have is watering. You need to know whether your climate in your garden is basically damp or dry and once again you can check this out on google, you can discuss it with neighbors, for example I live in southeast England which is very dry in the summer and I really find that plants that do well in well-drained soil or are drought resistant do very much better in my garden than a lot of other plants. It's important of course to have facilities for watering and a tap within reach, a hose reach of your borders will make a great deal of difference and also you can add water butts. You can put these so that water that runs off your roof goes into water butts or the roof of your sheds, but a word of warning, a small water butt is not going to last very long in a drought. If you can get two large water butts together or even three running into each other, you'll be able to build up a reasonable supply of water and you'll be able to use that for your watering. It is a good idea however to plant drought resistant plants if you have very dry climate and there is a video about that in the description below because actually water is quite an expensive resource and it takes time to water, so really although you will have to water things like veg, I would suggest designing your garden so it has the right amount of water naturally if you can. So how much time do you have? This is important because people sometimes are a little gardens, but the fact of the matter is that if you have a busy life, you really do need a garden that doesn't need too much work. Some plants need more work than others. The low maintenance plants are trees, shrubs, perennials, ornamental grasses and bulbs. Most of these will only need attention once or twice a year and all plants do need some attention, so really there is no such thing as no maintenance garden. I think it's helpful to define what each of these is. We all know what trees are. Shrubs are woody plants, they have a woody stem that stays above the ground all year round. Some shrubs are evergreen and their leaves stay on all year round and others lose their leaves in the winter and very often those ones have the most glorious autumn colors. Perennials are plants that stay in the ground year after year, so of course that's quite useful because they just come back in spring. Once again some of them are evergreen and stay on top of the ground the whole time, but others like asters disappear underground, although there may be a sort of dead plant structure during the winter which can be really attractive. Ornamental grasses are probably the lowest maintenance plants of all and you will find an ornamental grass for a damp garden, for a dry garden, for a shady garden, for a sunny garden and they look really good planted together in clumps. And bulbs of course, daffodils, lilies, nerines, tulips, hyacinths, once again you can often plant those in year one and they will still be coming back in year five with relatively little attention from you. But the showstoppers in the garden are the annuals and the biennials. These are the ones with the blazing flowers very often. Annuals are plants that grow from seed in one year, they flower and die by the end of the year. So something like a cosmos I might plant in my seed trays in say March, by June I'll plant it out in the garden, I'll keep deadheading it and then at the end of the year in maybe October I'll dig it up and throw it away. But of course that is quite a lot of work. Biennials do the same, they just do it over two years. I find it useful to grow a packet of seeds, just one packet a year, of something really colorful like cosmos or antirhinum and then use it to plug gaps in my border. That's not too much work, but having a great number of bedding plants which are annuals and biennials in your garden does mean you're going to have to keep replanting and deadheading and quite often fertilizing because they grow very fast, and that is more work than just having perennials, bulbs, ornamentals and shrubs. But in the end it's about what you want for your garden and if you want a blaze of glorious color then annuals and biennials are fabulous. So what tools do you need when you start gardening? You really don't need to go out and buy lots of tools, it's much better to buy just a few really good quality ones. I've asked Dan of Dan Cooper Garden who sells tools and accessories to tell us what the basic tools are we need and what to look for when we're buying them. So Dan we've got an impressive collection of tools here, what's the essential tool that every gardener needs? Well I would say it was a trowel because you're going to be planting at some stage and a trowel is a good all-round thing, you can use it for planting and weeding and all sorts of jobs, getting compost out of sacks for example. So I would go for a really nice quality metal one if you can, avoid painted finishes and coatings because they do tend to flake off and they often expose a surface that will rust more easily and a nice sharp edge is really useful especially if you've got quite heavy soil to dig into so I think a trowel would be the number one essential. If you want to avoid rust you can go for copper which has lots of great qualities that the soil sticks to a copper much less and of course it never rusts so that would be an alternative. Copper has a low friction coefficient so it means that soil sticks to copper less than it sticks to steel so that's one good thing but yes the lack of rust is another. Also you can sharpen copper more than you can sharpen steel so it has a slightly sharper edge. The only drawback I would say is that if you hit a really big stone or something metallic under the ground very hard it isn't quite as strong as steel is. What's the number two tool that we all need, every gardener needs? Well I think you need something that cuts so you're likely to be deadheading, doing a little bit like pruning perhaps, trimming things to make them a bit neater so I would say out of all of the tools that you could use for cutting I would say a pair of secateurs is the most important thing. What's really essential with choosing secateurs is that you must try them out in your hand because everyone's hands are very different and everyone's grip is very different so it's a good idea to go somewhere where you can actually pick them up and try them, make sure that action works well for you and a good clip or something to fix the blades back in is really handy so that when you put them in your pocket or your apron they don't ping back open again. And number three? Number three and people will be divided on this because there are people who like wearing gardening gloves and there are people who don't but I would say for lots and lots of reasons that a pair of gardening gloves is my number three. Now it all depends what kind of gardening you're going to be doing. If you're doing very lightweight stuff so if you're just going to be moving a few pots around or you're going to be deadheading or gardening mostly in the dry weather then a pair of nitrile gloves like these, a bit like a second skin, very very easy to wear and comfortable as well. But if you're going to be doing heavier gardening and for example gardening in the wet, leather gloves with a waterproof lining are really brilliant because they will protect your hands, they will give you a little bit more protection from any stones or sharp thorns that happen to be out there and the important thing is that you're able to really easily make a fist with them like that and if you can do that and it feels comfortable then they're the right fit for you. When they're like boxing gloves they're absolutely pointless and they don't really get any better with wear either. And so the next one? Well I tend to find having a small garden myself that I end up with sweeping up quite a lot so depends how small your garden is but I would say that either a really good yard brush or broom would be next and if your garden's quite small you've got a balcony, a dustpan and brush that's designed for you know being outside use so not not a nice indoor one so this one's got a painted finish that will protect the metal and then a nice sturdy brush with a good bristle that will be really useful when you come to sort of clearing up after yourself which brings me on to a really good bucket and again I like a proper galvanized metal pail you can get these from hardware shops and they are much much cheaper than some of the sort of pretty pails that you get and although a little bit heavy these will last you a lifetime I think well worth having. And so if the garden's going a bit bigger for example to my size garden which is 100 foot long 80 feet wide what would you say adding to that list of tools? So I think there's about 10 different things that you would add and it would depend on what kind of work you're going to be doing whether you do have lawns whether you have borders. I would definitely go for a spade this is a golden spade that's just the the paint finish and the paint finish will eventually come off this but the steel underneath is is a good quality and won't rust if you look after it well but a spade gives you the facility to plant bigger things like shrubs and trees to to dig trenches for example if you're planting potatoes or any other kind of vegetables perennials all sorts of things so I I would say a spade is slightly more useful than a fork but if you if you want the spade and fork combination which is quite traditional I would go for that so that would be next. Then if you don't go for the big border fork a normal hand fork like this is a good tool to have because it's just a step up from the trowel for things like weeding and actually getting things back out of the ground rather than putting them into the ground this one's got very sharp tines on it which is good so you can really sort of get into quite heavy soils and then a weeding tool of some kind so again a lot of this comes down to preference a little bit like the secateurs you've got to try and see see what you find easiest. I like this claw cultivator which is a bit like a but it's been turned in on itself and this just helps you really break up the surface of heavy soil for example if you're going to be sowing seeds and it's also very good if you can't just reach out those leaves or something from behind a clump of plants very good for collecting up stuff even getting things out of gutters but you might prefer something slightly slicker like this hand hoe which has a sharp edge and you draw it towards you and it sort of slices the weeds out from underneath themselves and then if you just leave them on the surface they will shrivel up and die. Sometimes you will want to do jobs that are a little bit too small for a pair of secateurs in which case a pair of scissors or a pair of snips like these are really good. Now here I would say again if you're just starting out you're on a tight budget you can use your scissors that you use inside perfectly well for doing things like deadheading but if you're going to be doing a lot of deadheading harvesting herbs trimming things you know for example if you've got a bonsai or anything like that or even if you're maintaining your house plants a little pair of snips like this is really good they have very very thin blades which is really useful when you're picking flowers for example or deadheading because you can really get in to the little bundles of flowers like floribunda roses or something like that when you're just trying to take out the dead flowers they're really really handy for that and a pair of secateurs is a bit too bulky for getting in there so I would recommend those. The tool I would definitely not be without even in my small garden is a pruning saw because secateurs you can cut up to one and a half centimeters but once you start to get over that diameter of twig or branch then you are putting a strain on them and probably putting a strain on yourself as well so I love a pruning saw because it's got this very sort of narrow and slightly angled blade which helps you to to get in and take branches that are slightly bigger off and if you get one like this one which just folds up nicely you can put that in your apron pocket and take that out with you and you don't have to worry about the sort of teeth which are really quite sharp and causing you any harm. So if you have hedges or which could be anything from a lavender hedge up to a much bigger hedge then you're going to need a pair of shears either manual ones or possibly you might want electrical hedge trimmers so a good pair of shears and these have got a nice long handle very sharp and these are quite good for sort of precision work if you've got a lot to do then you might want to go electric but I love a pair of hand shears so but if you didn't have anything that you needed you needed to trim like that then you can get away with doing quite a lot again with a pair of secateurs. And I can see another thing that actually I like a lot and that are the knee supports what are they knee pads? Well one of two things I think now again you've got the economy version which I sometimes use which is I often take an old compost sack around with me and I if I've got to kneel on the ground I just put that down and kneel on it not awfully comfortable or awfully warm but it's a you know it's an economical thing to do. You can also get kneelers which are really good they usually have a handle made of a very similar fabric to this and of course you know you have to remember where those are or kneelers which attach to your knee and that means that they're with you kind of all the time wherever you are. Then there's things like a hose pipe or watering can again you're going to need one or other of those I suspect in any size garden but you can make do and I put this here because this is a vintage watering can and I think you do see these around quite often and I suppose what I would say is that you don't have to buy everything new so I think this has a lot of charm and you know you could probably say they don't make them like this anymore. The only thing I would advise people if they see a really nice watering can in a vintage shop or at a brocante or something like that is to ask whoever's selling it to fill it with water for you and just leave it there for a little while to make sure that it is watertight because a lot of these old watering cans leak and you can't necessarily see when you're buying it so that's my one little check whenever I'm buying a vintage can I always make them fill it with water for me first. Wheelbarrows now if you have a small garden you presumably don't want a wheelbarrow because it's nowhere to put it but have you got any views on when you need a wheelbarrow and what sort of a wheelbarrow to get? Well wheelbarrows are if you need to travel a long distance in the garden or even outside the garden so for example we take things from our garden to our allotment then a wheelbarrow is going to take a lot of strain off you because obviously you can put quite a lot in it if you've got a nice well inflated tire on it it makes life really really easy but I think for most people with a small and middle-sized garden one of those flexible plastic trucks where you can because quite a big capacity but you can bring the handles together that's pretty good actually for transporting large amounts and they're light so you can get a reasonable amount of soil compost leaves whatever in it and still have it manageable much easier to carry I find two of something because I'm terrible for sort of being lopsided which isn't very good for your back so yeah a couple of those will probably ensure that you can move most of the things that you'd like to move in the garden. One thing I would say with things like wheelbarrows and other bigger bits of garden equipment as well is that if you're not going to use it very often and you've got a neighbor or a friend who who has one is you know share things like that because if you're going to use it once in a blue moon to move some manure from the front to the back of your house then you don't need to have a wheelbarrow all of the time. One of the cheapest and most satisfying ways of getting plants is growing them from seed and you can grow them from seed in spring and autumn and either way the method is the same so I've asked Sue Oriel of Country Lane Flowers to show us how she grows plants from seed. Sue and her business partner Stephanie grow all the flowers for their flower business in their own gardens. Well you've got four different types of plants that you can sow by seed and we break them down into their various categories so you have got perennial flowers, biennial flowers which are the ones that grow year one and flower year two, you've got hardy annual which will go through a British winter and in fact anywhere around about our zoning of eight or nine ish and then you've got half hardy annuals which will not go through the winter at all. So Sue talk us through how you store your seeds and how you remember to sow the right seeds at the right time of year. Okay so as you can see I've got this high-tech shoebox which is very important for me because what it has allowed me to do is make a sort of card index month by month so again highly sophisticated tells me what's in each month. I have filed the seeds across the year and you'll see from this that there's a big batch of stuff in the spring all of those are spring sown flowers coming through into the summer itself it gets much there are much fewer and so in July I'm doing almost nothing in August ditto when it comes to September which is where we are now with this great clutch of things that I should be getting on with. So Sue talk us through how you actually sow seeds. The way I would do it now as a professional grower is to be incredibly sparing with the seed and to put them in individual modules per seed possibly two if I'm if they're not strong germinators but if I'm pretty sure they'll germinate well I will put one seed per module and in the past when I was doing amateur seed sowing I'd get the packet and I'd sprinkle it all over a tray of compost I'd end up with 400 seedlings and I think oh no what am I going to do with all of those but of course now as a professional you want to be sparing with your seed because it lasts a great deal of time when you properly protect it keep it in a dark place keep it cool and therefore you can use it year after year after year never mind those sow by 2022 things people write on seed packets that's almost entirely irrelevant if you're looking after the seed so one seed per module seed compost is absolutely critical you don't the seed itself has got all the nutrients it needs in its tiny little seed packet and not you know in the in the thing itself and it will grow perfectly well in a well-drained which is what seed compost is all about massively well-drained soil with almost no nutrients in it at all right well the first thing you need if you were a professional grower you'd take a 15 by 3 modular seed tray and you fill it up with seed compost not potting compost seed compost smooth it all off and then give it a knock down to make sure there aren't any giant air pockets within the soil and then in this particular bed i'm going to sow olea grandiflora or the white lace flower in order to get it going i will simply make a mark in each of these you don't need to do a tray of 15 you can do some in a pot 15 plants will do me very nicely for the season so i'll just pop these into the top like this one by one by one usually the planting depth of a seed is about the same size as the seed things very rarely need a lot of depth so that's them in there and then in order to cover them i will just it often says sprinkle over but you don't need to sprinkle over you've got plenty of compost there just muddle them in like that so that they're under and and then just give them a shake down then the next thing to do is always put a label on you think you will remember but you won't and then water the seed tray from the bottom like that so that the the moisture is brought up through the soil and i'll leave that in there for about 10 minutes and then i'll notice it's looking damp on the top i will take that out and pop it into a propagator and then when it's a good size and the roots are starting to fill the module you will move it on either to the outside if it's the right time of year and the frosts are over or you'll move it into a bigger pot in regular potting compost which has got nutrients and they'd stay in a cool greenhouse if they're too hot they go leggy and you don't want a leggy seedling because they've got no strength when you come to plant them out so keep them keep them tight compact plants well fed ready to be moved on after hardening off which is the most critical part of this whole process before planting out if you go straight from your cold greenhouse even though it's cold to a flower bed the thing will have a shock and it'll stop growing and you'll find they'll just sit there sulking like mad so harden them off and that means taking your seed tray of little baby plants if it's a lovely sunny day you can just put them outside and leave them you know anywhere you like just for a few hours the first time and then you can increase that amount of time but it doesn't take more than a week to harden anything off you don't need to do this for months on end absolutely not complete waste of time so about a week of hardening off and if somebody hasn't got a greenhouse or a cold frame or even a potting shed what would you recommend that they choose a coolish room in their house use a heated propagator and then or a heat mat and then take them away from the heat and have them on something like perhaps a cool windowsill would that work i think if i was doing them inside i'd probably put them if i hadn't got a propagator either you could do it in a kitchen somewhere quite warm and somewhere nice and light because most seeds do need light to germinate as well and as soon as they pop their little heads up in a warm kitchen then i'd move them to a cooler but sunnier windowsill maybe in a spare bedroom or a porch or even the window in your garage somewhere like that if you're going to move it to an outbuilding though do watch out for mice because they just love a little munch through things especially things like sweet peas which is another thing you'll be seeing at this time of year so and i gather the mice have munched a few of your seed packets aren't they sweet but i i noticed today that they've actually eaten their way through a packet of larkspur which i have bad news for them those are poisonous i would say the other practical thing about is if you're moving a seedling from potting it on never touch the root always pick the seedling up by the leaf very gently you can and then move it on use a pencil you don't need one of those dibber things that's a complete waste of money or even your finger make a little hole drop the seedling into that with a little root fur down because you're so you're holding it like that you've made a hole like that and then you just gently push the soil around it don't mush it in like that it doesn't like that it likes to have air and water getting to the roots so don't firm them in as if it was trying to hold a flagpole up straight you just want a tiny it's a tiny gentle thing and that would be the other thing i would say the other thing is don't ever water it by spraying the top with water this is a disaster always water your seed trays by putting them in something that you can soak like that so they go in and the water will rise up through the thing don't water from the top the way we garden has changed a lot over the last few years and there's now much less emphasis on maintaining control and much more emphasis on being wildlife friendly and environmentally friendly and the good news about this is that actually it means buying less and doing less so let's go down to one of the most famous gardens in britain great dixter where it's well known for being both biodiverse wildlife friendly and to have beautiful borders and ask the head gardener fergus garrett for his tips on what we need to know in order to garden in an environmentally friendly way i think soil is key to this but first of all i must say the most important thing is that you don't use chemicals you don't use any sides you know no insecticides or pesticides and and that was really key to us because when we first stopped using them we thought oh there's going to be you know we're going to be able to run with pests and diseases and we weren't in the first year that obviously we had a few aphids and things but it sort of balanced itself out because every time you spray you're not only getting rid of the bad things but you're getting rid of the good things as well so and so far and many years on we seem to have a really lovely balance because there's a prey predator balance here so i think that's key not to spray you know i think the other thing is we try and cut down the amount of fertilizer we we use you know so anything that comes out of a bag and we do it with organic waste rather than having a sort of inorganic fertilizer we used to in the old days use things like grow more but we don't you know then we went on to using fish blood and bone bone meal which is organic and then we thought we don't actually need that at all because our ground is rich we add a lot of organic matter to it so do we need to supplement it with all this sort of extra feed so we cut that out and didn't make any difference you know things grew perfectly well and so organic matter is very important to us but but again if i was on growing stuff on shingle on a beach rather rather like the gardens you get on dungeness and things like that i wouldn't want to use any organic matter i would use the right plant in the right place that's absolutely adapted to those conditions but here right in the middle of the world you know with the sort of rolling countryside around us and we're on the woodland edge i think um putting that compost on is has been key it's been key not only for the quality of the soil and all the mycorrhiza and everything that's in there so our soil is very healthy it's also been key because um it means that we don't have to water week in week out you know the long border this this year has been watered three times last year in the drought it was only watered four times you know i think this year we could have got away with just watering it twice and so so you know because you've got this really wonderful root systems as a result of having rich soil but also the mycorrhiza tapping into the roots and making that root area much bigger as as well so so i think what we're finding is that we use less and less of stuff that we have to buy in you know that it's it's it's much more circular than it than it used to be which is which is wonderful with the compost and obviously you can make your own garden compost here do you also use well-rushed garden manure or what would you use if you can't make all the garden compost you need we make some of our own but that stuff never is enough so we have to buy in and so what we're looking for is buying in something that's a by-product or a waste product that's organic that hasn't got chemicals in it and and from wherever you are that that sort of varies but we're very fortunate in that there is a organization that makes electricity with green waste and and so we get the sort of the by-product of that so we get this wonderful compost relatively cheap that's actually been used in the green industry and and it's only just a stone's throw away from us and sometimes we use composted bark from the various industrial forestry areas that we had around us that isn't so good because it hasn't really broken down enough but you could buy it and let it sit somewhere and you'll make perfectly good compost with that of course you can use farm yard manure as well as long as you know what's what's in it you know as long as you you know that very often it's riddled with weed seed but if I didn't have anything to use any alternative I'd use farm yard manure and in terms of plant choices how do you decide that how much do you take into account wanting to be biodiverse and wanting to be wildlife friendly and how much is it gosh we really love that flower let's have that Dixter's a big garden it's about six acres in total so there's room for everything and but we've never ever chosen something because it was good for pollinators we've just chosen something because we like the look of it or it would fit into our scheme of planting if I had a small garden and I wanted a garden for wildlife of course I'd choose things that were pollinator friendly you know things that were single flowers rather than doubles and so on and you know there's certain things that really attract the various bees and and and butterflies so you'd make a sort of bee line for those but here we've never ever gone down that route because we think variety is key and there are sort of things that will like alliums and anything in the carrot family that will actually attract a large range of flying insects and they're almost like landing pads that they can land on but then there are sort of obscure things that we grow that will be sort of very specific for certain insects so we like the diversity here and we find that it's not just the diversity of flowers but the diversity of activities you know we don't mind growing annuals for instance because that sort of mimics cornfield habitats for instance it doesn't all have to be perennials or shrubs or woodies it's we grow a whole range of plants. And I think you also said that you have allowed certain weeds to creep in so what's your approach to weeding? We weed you know we don't but I didn't allow things to creep in because they increased the wildlife value I allowed cow party to come into the borders because I thought it was a beautiful plant that was the reason for doing that I allow buttercup to come to certain areas because I think it's a beautiful plant and same with dandelions you know that we're not overrun with them I suppose cow pasty does get a bit heavy sometimes but we cut it down before it seeds it everywhere but I just love the garden floating in that sort of white white mist that cow pasty time and I don't even know what insects go on it you see so it's a very much an aesthetic thing that decision and the same with the buttercups as well I love those buttercups at that time that sort of that deep yellow amongst fritillaries and those sort of things popping up in the borders here and there and and they're the sort of the main weeds inverted commas that we're allowed to come in you know one person's weed is a another person's perfectly a good garden plant and is it just hand weeding or do you do anything with a flame torch I mean I presume you obviously don't use weedicides it's all hand weeding but borders are pretty packed so once you once you weed them it's easy to stay on top of them things like bindweed can be a problem you know because their roots go everywhere and we've had a bindweed problem in the high garden but um you know and you know I am not at that stage where I think it's a beautiful plant I've got a neighbor who thinks it's a beautiful plant who lets it grow and and she even goes out there and and waters it which I think is rather nice but it's not it's not for us and then speaking of watering you said you only watered the long border once this year and only four times in that really hideously long hot summer we had so how do you go about watering do you water it just very very thoroughly but very rarely so we watered um long border twice this year yeah and four times in the drought and what we do each watering is a two-hour spot so we have a a small just a tiny sprinkler that fits in under the vegetation so it's not over the top it's under the vegetation we put it there and it just sort of dribbles out this this sort of spray of water for two hours and then we move it to the next spot so it's had in essence the long border this year has had four hours of water and that's and that's it partly because plant choice is important so if something was needing watering every single week we wouldn't we wouldn't grow it here because it's just not for us it's for somewhere else so right plant right place comes first and the soil quality is important as well to allow a big root development which is very important and i think on time of planting we water really thoroughly and mulch immediately afterwards so we'll dig out you know we won't just put a little bit of water we give it a really thorough soaking and then we mulch it so that the stays deep down and the roots develop deep down as well and you've just done a project haven't you to listen to all this diversity you've got an audio project that will be coming in 2024 where people can actually listen to all the sounds of Great Dixter from people talking to the chomping away inside the habitat pile which is the most amazing sound it's all this little chompy chompy chompy bits and the habitat pile if you tell me how would someone in a smaller garden build a well rather burn prunings and wood they just pile stuff up i know people who actually use logs to create walls and divisions in the in the border but just just a pile of logs rotting down somewhere would be is it creates a habitat they don't have to be the massive piles that we've got at Dixter i mean i built big ones at Dixter because i wanted to mimic Hungarian haystacks you know that's what i wanted and they look rather like that and i wanted to have a no burn policy because i wasn't sure you know we used to pile up all the all the prunings and then burn it and i wasn't sure whether we had slow worms in there or hedgehogs in there and whatever and i thought it was just completely unnecessary so let's just let all of this just die down naturally so and of course we've got the space to put a big heap like that but you could always tuck these things away at the back of borders or behind plantings or behind the shed and just let wood rot and there's a sort of whole succession of insects that comes as a result of that you know the initial wood bearers and things that live underneath the bark and then something else and something else and and then and all the sort of the predators of the detritivores come and this is why it was so interesting to put that microphone into that habitat parlance hear all these things that are sort of chomping away and you know that there's a whole sort of microcosm of of of predators waiting to get those things as well so the whole world opens up in in front of you that world and that in a pile of old wood i thought we'd all like to hear what happens when you put a microphone into a habitat pile so the people running the project sound matters have very kindly let us listen to a short stretch of it it'll just take a few seconds the basic principle is that when you allow pests to build up in your garden you attract predators which eat them and that reduces the number of pests of course you will get some nibbled leaves but when we were using insecticides we got nibbled leaves anyway but you might be a bit worried about the idea of slugs and snails marching uncontrolled around your garden so let's go to somebody who grows plants for a living steven ryan of the horticulturalist youtube channel who also has a nursery and he can't afford for his plants to be eaten by snails and he doesn't really use insecticides so let's hear the tricks from him well of course in a nursery you do try and keep a nursery reasonably tidy but that doesn't mean you don't create lots of habitats for slugs and snails because you've got all these pots sitting next to each other so in fact it's the perfect place for slugs and snails to live and in fact you can pick up the average pot in my nursery and lo and behold you'll find a slug living underneath it so it creates quite good habitat for slugs and snails so certainly from the perspective of plants that are prone to slug and snail attack i tend to grow them particularly as young plants up on shelves so i keep them out of the way of slugs and snails as much as possible i've learned the bitter lesson of losing some very rare seedlings that are particularly tasty to slugs and snails because i didn't put them up so i tend to do that a fair bit i have to say a lot of my plant range now seems not to be particularly prone to attack so a lot plants i'm growing are more woody shrubs and trees which of course are less likely to be attacked by slugs and snails i think the point you make about putting something high up on the shelf is interesting because i spoke to the senior wildlife specialist helen bostock at the rhs about this and they've done tests about barrier methods of slug and snail control and they found that on the whole the barrier methods that's the horticultural grit the copper tape the wool pellets coffee grounds all that sort of thing which you put around the plant to stop the snugs and snails going over it but the awful thing is they don't work so well or the tests showed they didn't work so well because the slugs can go under if i was using something so like the copper i wouldn't use a copper ring i would have a strip of copper that i buried down into the ground with its tip just sticking up i think the copper does work there was a product here for some time which seems to have disappeared off the market which was actually a liquid copper and you could spray the top of the pot and the copper would dry on the top of the pot and well i believe i've got proof that it worked because the very plants that i was trying to protect were absolute slug and snail magnets and they didn't eat the new shoots on these plants which of course is why the pots and the shelves work because if you were to put say grit or coffee grounds or whatever on your pot and then the pot goes up the snail or slug can't actually burrow under that no exactly and what helen said is it actually all wildlife choose the easy way and it's not easy to go up three or four flights of shelves in order to get to something so actually there's a lot to be said the pots and keeping it out the way and making it just harder for the snails and slugs to work their way up obviously is a really good thing particularly for the young plants and certainly with particularly vegetable and flower growers i mean most of the annuals and things that we grow in our flower gardens and our vegetable gardens vast majority of them seem to be great slug and snail fodder so yes the best thing you can do is to grow them up to a decent size and a reasonable size pot before you put them into the ground if you know you have particularly bad slug and snail problems and that brings us on to the slug resistant plants and now in many ways here in australia in here in the uk in north america and all these other places we actually grow a lot of the same plants we've got lilies we've got dahlias we've got roses we've got all kinds of things peonies so we presumably have similarly slug resistant plant categories you can probably tell us these are the categories of plants to go for that won't have slug and snail damage is that right yeah well generally speaking hard leafed plants so just to throw examples out there i mean a slug or snail not going to bother a camellia because it's got those really hard hard leaves so anything that has really hard surface to the foliage is likely not to be particularly attractive to slugs and snails it's nearly always the softer leafed plants that will so certainly if you go down that avenue it can help funnily enough some of the softer leaf things if they're summer growing when the weather is drier and warmer the slugs and snails tend to be less active at that time of the year so if it's a summer growing plant that is dormant during the the winter spring months that sometimes will find its way past the slugs and snails because they're hibernating when it gets too dry although that may in normal summers not necessarily be a thing that works in england because you do get cooler weather than we get but when it's really hot and dry here in australia the slugs and snails they'll all disappear into the rock work in your rock walls or into your clumps of agapanthus which seem to be the things that they love here and they'll just hibernate until they get rain then they'll come out and maraud things but in the meantime while it's hot and dry they stay away yes we had a very hot dry summer in the uk last year and certainly my canners and my dahlias did not get slug and snail damage yeah so it helps if you have weather that's in your favor yes but that's something we can't really control no you can't and so what about things like the rosemary's the lavenders and a lot of the shrubs perfectly good plants if you're trying to discourage slugs and snails because things that are really resinous are also not likely to be things that they're going to have a go at what about i'm just looking at this garden agastache monado yeah again those sorts of plants are more herby type plants they tend to have interesting chemicals in their leaves that you can smell when you brush the leaves so anything with an aromatic sort of leaf is likely to be less prone to slug and snail attack so you know rosemary lavender a lot of those herb type plants are full of resins and and and chemicals that in fact deter slugs and snails so they're they're perfectly good plants to grow for that sort of thing the other extreme of course tends to be things that have really highly nutritious leaves which is most of our vegetables and also things in the legume family the pea family when they're they're very prone to slug and snail attack as i can prove with many an example from my nursery and they can get to quite a good size i've actually had laburnums that were actually small trees already they were probably a meter and a half two meter tall where we've had a wet spell in the summer and i haven't been paying attention and the snails will crawl all out the trunks of the laburnums and eat all the foliage off them and they can do it virtually overnight which is odd when you consider laburnum has poisonous seeds and all those sorts of things but anything that's a legume seems to be really popular with slugs and snails because i think they've got a lot of nitrogen in them so they're they're very nutritious for our little gastropods so what about the really flowering plants things like lilies dahlias cannas are there any of those that are particularly slug resistant well you've missed delphiniums but yes most of them are in fact comparatively tasty to slugs and snails but certainly things like lilliums once they get above a certain height it's when they're just coming through the ground that they're more at risk so you might put something over them to protect like a plastic PET bottle or something like that just until they get break the surface properly and then the damage is likely to be less of a problem same with dahlias they tend to grow out of the problems to a large extent you'll get a few holes and things but nothing major and i think that they will come from miles around for the average delphinium or the average hosta and so you've just got to work out a management system that's going to work for those particular plants certainly hostas if you've got a big problem with them are great in big pots and you can actually then have some sort of control over slugs and snails if you lift them up off the ground delphiniums well they really need to be in the ground so you've just got to work out a technique of getting around that first stage and what about the slightly furry fuzzy leaves tends not to be as much of a problem with slugs and snails they don't seem to like the furry leaf plants as much roses are they slug resistant plants pretty well you don't tend to find roses get attacked by them there'll be somebody out there that will say that's not true because somebody will have had experience of slugs and snails attacking their roses the other thing with roses of course is being woody plants most of their foliage is well up off the ground when they break out into leaf in the spring so they're just physically a little bit further away from the slugs and snails so the bigger something grows the less likely it's to be a problem in due course except of course with laburnums i don't know what it is that drags slugs and snails right up the top of a laburnum but they'll do it i know that on the horticulturalists you often cover quite rare plants and i often think people who watch your channel must have actually very interesting gardens because they're obviously really interested in where plants come from and how to make the best of them and things like that so would you say that if a plant is rare or unusual it might have more slug damage or less slug damage or actually does that not correlate in any way i don't think it correlates i mean certainly i've just raised a little batch of a very rare plant from easter island sephora toremiro which is actually extinct in the wild has been since i think the beginning of the last century sometime and it was found again in the melbourne botanic gardens and some seed was found in believe it or not stockholm i think and so the plant has been sort of vaguely reintroduced into horticulture i raised a batch of seedlings of it a few years ago and without thinking because it is a legume i should have known better one day they were fine the next day i came in the slugs and snails had eaten a lot so i've started a new batch of them i've got them up on a shelf they're they're probably i don't know four or five inches tall in the old measurements and they're doing really well because they're well and truly up off the ground they're on a metal framed stand so it's very hard for slugs and snails to get up there and get them but i think one of the things that people can take away from what i do in my garden that might be worth considering is that of course if you're a mad plant collector and you want to have lots and lots of different plants around you the issues are likely to be less of a problem because you've only got one or two of something and so if that becomes absolutely slug bait well then maybe you might lose one or two plants but if you're planting a whole garden up with things as we do when we're planting vegetables where you're planting crops then the damage can be far more obvious and far more devastating in a way so sometimes i just stop growing something if it's particularly prone to an issue sometimes it's better just to take the the easy way out and say i'm not growing that anymore let somebody else deal with that that's got the time because the world's full of plants so i've got lots of other things i can grow i must ask you about what i always think of as the london method snail control when i lived in london we all had very small gardens and what people used to do was to pick off the slugs and snails and throw them over the fence and i do remember actually having dinner outside once and a snail landing from one of my neighbors we threw it back again i would have as well i have to say brian was sending that snail back and he said oh oh i'm sorry about that yes yeah well i don't think any of those things really work because if your neighbor's throwing them over your fence and you're picking them up and throwing them over the next person's fence all you're doing is giving them a holiday in somebody else's garden i don't think that works if you're going to deal with it i have to say tap dancing on snails at night works quite well if you can bring yourself to do it it's generally what i do if i find them because i regularly go around at night just after dusk if it's been raining i go out to lock up the chickens and i'll walk around the garden and if i see snails around well i just stomp on them and that seems to help keep the numbers down and of course you could also i presumably feed them to the chickens that's the other thing i regularly do because unfortunately in this country we don't have a lot of wildlife that makes use of them because the garden snail and slug came out here so there's not the natural predators of the garden snail here but certainly chickens and ducks love of course one of the things that you'll do as a new gardener is go out and buy some garden furniture and although the brands are different all over the world and obviously the prices are different depending on your budget there are a few general tips that are worth knowing so don't miss them in this video here on how to choose garden furniture and thank you for watching goodbye