Two drums sit behind my shed. One is a 200-litre two-chamber tumbler I bought in 2014. The other is a 90-litre single barrel, picked up second-hand for twenty pounds. Between them they have taught me more about composting than any book,…
Two winters ago I helped reset 34 metres of border along a south-facing wall in Herefordshire. The owner had bought flexible steel the summer before. He pushed it into bare soil with a rubber mallet. By February, every second section had…
Kerb appeal is not a mystery. Stand on the pavement outside a stranger’s house and you know inside four seconds whether somebody lives there with intent. That first read comes from proportion. Money does not matter…
Fine fescue first. Tall fescue second. Kentucky bluegrass only if you enjoy wasting money. That is the short answer to grass in shade. What follows is the long one. Purdue’s turf specialists rate the five fine fescue types as the best…
A robot mower is a small grazing animal that eats a lawn in bites. On the right lawn you forget it exists for weeks at a time. On the wrong lawn you spend more time rescuing it than you ever spent pushing a mower. I have had both outcomes,…
Most lawn fertiliser is bought in the first warm week of April. The grass looks flat and pale after winter, the bags are stacked by the garden centre door, and a feed seems like the obvious cure. It is usually the wrong product. Often it…
Two summers ago I watched a neighbour lose a bed of dahlias in nine days. The roots were fine. He had sprayed a lawn weedkiller along his grass edge, the wind picked up, and a fine mist drifted four feet into the border. The leaves cupped…
Deer are careful eaters, and that one fact explains most repellent failures. A whitetail does not walk into a garden and graze it flat. It samples. It takes a nip from one plant, drifts down the row, and comes back to whatever it liked…
Few jobs in the garden irritate me more than chasing molluscs. Over twenty seasons I have lost far more lettuce to slugs than to frost, drought or pigeons, and I have tried nearly every remedy the internet promotes. Some worked. Most did…
Rainwater suits plants better than anything that comes out of a tap. It is soft, slightly acidic, and free of the chlorine and dissolved lime that mains supply carries. The RHS rates it the best option for garden watering and notes that…
