How ‘green’ is my garden?
WILDLIFE GROUNDSWELL TALKING POINT:
How ‘green’ is my garden? Caroline Richardson
Garden Centres are lovely places, full of gorgeous looking plants and other items which can beautify our gardens. I do use them to buy plants for my moderately- sized garden, and I also sometimes buy plants and seeds online.
Wherever I source my plants and seeds, I am increasingly conscious of the carbon- and plastic- footprint of my purchases, as well as other important factors such as price. And I realise that there is quite a lot I can
do to minimise what are now recognised as potentially damaging impacts, in ways which can also save me money and make my garden more wildlife friendly — and all this without compromising on the beauty, abundance and productivity of my garden. Here are some examples of what I mean. Annuals vs. perennials: Annuals, including most bedding plants such as begonias and petunias, are plants which germinate, grow
and flower all in one season. This means that you will usually have to buy and plant new ones each year - which can be expensive and time-consuming. If bought as young plants in trays it is also costly in terms of their carbon, peat and plastic footprints. These plants may not have been grown locally and may already have notched up significant ‘plant miles’ before you get them home. Perennials, on the other hand, flower
and fruit year after year. They can be equally striking in a garden border, but you are only incurring one pur- chase, which over a period of years saves significant amounts in terms of cost, plastic and carbon.
Potting composts: Peat is amazing. It has developed at a rate of around one centimetre per decade in boggy, mossy conditions and locks up huge amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. But when it is dug up and used to grow plants, much of that carbon is released, adding to the damaging CO2 which causes man-made climate change. All bagged compost sold in garden and DIY centres should now be peat-free, but professional growers can and do still use it to grow plants they sell to us.
Plant food: There is a huge range of plant foods available to buy - nearly all of it packaged in some form of plastic. Why buy this when we can so easily make our own? Here on the Lizard we are blessed with access to lots of beaches where (with the owner’s permission) we can gather seaweed - an excellent plant food when steeped in water for a week or two. Nettles are also a great source of helpful plant minerals. There is lots
of advice online about widely-available and free plants that can be used to make home-made plant tonics. Saving seeds and taking cuttings: This is one of the best ways of saving money, and of cutting down on our gardening carbon/plastic foot- print. It’s also interesting and very rewarding to do (so long as you remember to label your seeds!). Using good quality seeds from the plants you have grown in your garden can also, over time, enhance their suit- ability to the conditions of your particular locality or micro-climate. Some plants can also be propagated for free by taking cuttings - and again, there is plenty of information online as to how to do this. Perennial fruits and vegetables: Most of the fruits that I grow in my garden are perennials: strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb, gooseberries, blackcurrants and of course tree-borne fruits like apples and pears. And most of our familiar herbs - thyme, rosemary, sage and oregano - are too. Less well known but equally rewarding are the perennial vegetables like asparagus, spinach beet, Babington leeks and varieties of ‘tree cabbage’ such as Taunton Deane. Some of these can be short-lived (4 or 5 years) but are generally easy to propagate and thus can be kept going indefinitely. Most garden vegetables are annuals, but it is easy to save pea and bean seeds and, in the case of potatoes and Jerusalem artichokes, to leave a few tubers in the ground so that they re-grow the following year. There are many more ‘gardening hacks’ which can help both us and the planet, I hope the ones mentioned here may have given you some ‘food for thought’.
