This summer, as part of our new Nature on your Doorstep project, we put a call out for homeowners to come forward who were up for the challenge of helping wildlife in their gardens. Over four blogs, I’ll be sharing the ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories of the garden mini-makeover videos we made.
What the homeowners didn’t have were massive budgets, a dozen burly workers and oodles of time, like you see on the telly. Instead, they were asked to spend around £250, and had just one day to make some improvements, with just a little bit of help from me. We wanted to show the reality of what almost anyone can do on a limited budget and with only a bit of time to spare.
For today's garden, we are going native in a Cambridgeshire garden. Watch the video here. Photos by WildSide Productions.
Chris and Emily - not forgetting Nero the dog - live within a stone’s throw of Grafham Water, and have been in their house for about a year.
The garden they inherited is one of those where wildlife had effectively been wiped out of existence, buried beneath a layer of decking and concrete; it is like Planet Earth after a meteorite strike! It is always an exciting start because it means Chris and Emily can only do positive things for wildlife there.
Even the areas that weren't concrete slabs were beds of concrete:
With a garden like this, there is a clearance job to be done before you can even consider creating something wonderful, so ahead of our mini-makeover, Chris and Emily lifted the slabs and got in someone with a breaker to attack the underlying bed of concrete.
Chris and Emily then cleared the rubble, but then the garden flooded in those July deluges we had.
Ok, so little warning bells were going off in my mind, but then if there are almost no plants to intercept and soak up the rain and just hard surfaces funnelling all the rainwater into the heart of the garden, that’s what can happen. Undaunted, we rescheduled the minimakeover for the end of the summer.
At our online consultation, Chris and Emily said they'd like a garden full of mostly native plants, quite different from the other three gardens where we used predominantly cultivated and garden plants. Native plants do tend to have lots of value for wildlife, but they don't tend to be as showy as garden flowers. However, not all are shrinking violets, and there are plenty that are garden-worthy, so what a great chance to showcase them.
I suggested that we source them as peat-free plug plants. This is a much cheaper way of buying plants– each one can cost a pound or less. But they are ickle when they arrive, often little more than a tuft of leaves. The ones I brought for Chris and Emily I potted on into peat-free compost and grew on for about a month so that by the time we came to planting, they were that little bit bigger.
Top tip: Planting plug plants needs a good dollop of patience, as they will only come into their own the following year year. But as a way of planting up a large area of garden cheaply, they are really effective.
As with all our mini-makeovers, our aim was not to transform the entire garden. Our achievable goal for the day was to lay a simple path to the back gate, create some woodland borders alongside it where it is heavily shaded by a tall fence, plant a fruit tree, and add some trellis and climbing plants to the fences on both the sunny and shady sides of the garden.
A lawn for Nero and a pond will come later; setting those out onto a masterplan now means you know what you do now will fit in to the ultimate scheme.
Our first task on mini-makeover day was to use a few of the lifted slabs to create a stepping-stone path down the garden. While paving over an entire garden is disastrous for wildlife, it is still important to be able to walk through your space, whatever the weather. Laying a path with gaps cuts the number of slabs you need and leaves more growing space in between.
A slab path would often be laid either on a bed of concrete (with all the huge carbon footprint that concrete has) or on sand, but with an informal stepping stone path we just sunk them into the hard earth and they will be fine.
We then improved the clayey soil by digging in a bulk bag of peat-free topsoil – that’s almost a tonne of the stuff. It is amazing such a bag, which measures almost a cubic metre, almost disappears when it is spread and dug in. However, it is time and money well spent as it will make tending the garden that much easier and the plants and wildlife will reap the benefits.
Then we could set about the fun bit - the planting.
We started by laying the plants out in their pots to get an idea of how they might sit together - small plants to the front, larger to the back, planting in groups of three or five and looking for what will become good contrasts of leaf shape and flower colour.
For the climbers, Honeysuckle and Ivy are ideal for a north-facing fence, Passionflower and Hop for a sunny fence, and Clematis likes to climb into the sun but have its roots in shade – the Orange-peel Clematis is great for bees.
Chris and Emily planted the Apple tree in a good sunny position - I stood well back because it is something you want the homeowners to be able to say in years to come, "I did that!".
Top tip: Fruit trees come grafted onto a rootstock, and it is that rootstock that will help determine the ultimate size of the tree. The numbers used in horticulture aren't very helpful - for example, M9 is a dwarf apple, M26 is semi-dwarf, M106 is a moderate sized tree and M25 is a vigorous tree. Confusing, huh? The main thing is to realise there are differences, read the label, and choose one that will be right for your garden. Chris and Emily wanted a fair sized tree that will be a route into the garden for birds and a show of blossom and fruit, so we went M106.
A bee hotel (facing south) and a bird box (in the shade under the canopy of the shed) completed the day's work. Only next spring will the garden begin to fill out, but the bones are now in place for a verdant, wildlife-filled space. And Nero had had endless tummy tickling along the way so everyone was happy.
Plant choices
Woodland plants (plugs)
Shrubs
Climbers
Tree: Apple Cox’s Orange Pippin
Budget
If you want to drop by my RSPB wildlife gardening blog, it is updated every Friday, and I'd love to see you there - www.rspb.org.uk/community/blogs/hfw
Well done you all!
Look forward to future photos!?