LJN Blog Posts

I’m a lot more interested in plants than I am in lawns, and our lawns have been gradually diminishing since we moved in 4 years ago. However, neither my husband nor I are particularly keen on digging, and we’ve run out of places to stack stripped turf, so when I decided that another chunk of lawn should make way for plants, I ordered in 2 cubic metres of mushroom compost and spread it straight on the grass, using some big sheets of cardboard that some furniture had been delivered in, to cover it up and stop the birds slinging the compost all over the garden.

It’s by no means pretty, but the plan is that over winter the grass will die off and the worms will start to incorporate the compost into our extremely dry sandy soil. By the Spring, we’ll have put in some chunky timber edgings to make a low raised bed (which may or may not have a small water feature in...), the cardboard can go on the compost heap, and hopefully we’ll have a nice rich friable soil to plant into.

That’s the lazy bit. However, that left more than half of the compost to be spread around the garden. During the Spring and Summer I watched the garden struggle with the minimal rainfall that this part of Gloucestershire had to make do with; occasional watering with a hose just couldn’t compensate. Hopefully a good mulch on (finally!) wet soils will help the plants to cope if next year is as dry. So that meant picking up several sacks of leaves before tucking the garden up for the Winter in a nice soft cosy blanket of compost. The leaves of course will sit in black sacks behind the shed for a couple of years to make leafmould – black gold. I do sometimes just tuck them under shrubs and I’m sure this is good for providing habitat for minibeasts and generally supporting a more diverse and robust ecosystem in the garden, but I didn’t want them under the mulch in case they robbed the soil of nitrogen as they broke down (unnecessarily cautious?). This was all pretty hard work, though in a final gesture to laziness, I’m afraid I mulched over lots of small weeds and self-seeded plants – I’ll know in the Spring if this was a mistake.

I have great respect for anyone who gardens for a living – by the end of this, my hamstrings were tight enough to snap! Not what I needed when doing long runs in training for a charity run next month, and a couple of days setting out about 700 plants on site the following week was further punishment. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger...