Composting Ideas, Tips & Guides

Green leaves are the energy engines that fuel our gardens. Without them there would be no flowers, no sugars for summer tomatoes, and no cooling or oxygenating the air while growing the mighty trees that give landscapes a sense of time and permanence. A gardener’s admiration of leaves can quickly fade, however, when faced with brown leaves blanketing everything from azaleas to annuals, and patios to pools. Leaves are suddenly a problem, something to manage—in other words, work.

Want a garden that supports wildlife and pollinators even in the colder months? Then you need to create a hibernation-friendly garden. This will help you transform your garden into a comfortable habitat for these beneficial insects.

If you're starting a goat herd, you must know some basics about the animals you're tending, including how to feed them properly. Whether raising goats for meat, establishing a dairy herd, or practicing sustainable living on your homestead or small farm, you'll need to give your goats the attention they need to thrive.

Repotting your houseplants is crucial to keeping them thriving. Whether you're new to plant care or a seasoned gardener, knowing the right time and method to repot your plants is key. In this guide, we'll share essential tips and tricks for repotting your houseplants, ensuring they adapt well and continue to flourish in their new pots. We’ll cover when to repot, the best practices to follow, and whether it’s advisable to repot during the winter months. Let’s dive in!

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As fall rolls in, your garden may begin shimmering with bronze and red autumn leaves—a sight to behold! Instead of raking them away, why not put these fallen leaves to good use in September? Let’s explore.

As summer’s blooms start to fade, autumn might seem like a fallow period for flower growers. Although the year’s floral productivity is gently winding down, the list of jobs for the following season’s harvest is just revving into gear. Once the August bank holiday is over, a certain focus descends over the flower farm to prepare for the next year. Embrace it, and accept it is virtually impossible to ever prepare as much as you aspire to. Whatever hard graft you do put in through autumn will pay dividends in a season full of flowers from spring onwards.

Chinese Gentian (Gentiana sino-ornata)

However, cauliflower is a cool-season crop, but there are many hybrid cultivars available for both temperate and tropical weather, which means it can be grown diversely in every climate.

Native to the Mediterranean, lavender is a hardy medicinal herb from the mint family, comprising over 30 species. This evergreen shrub is all the rage in gardening because its utility extends beyond good looks and amazing fragrance.

When and How to Fertilize Jasmine

Weeds are party crashers—they are not invited, take up space and resources, and are not dressed for the occasion. However, some are extremely useful in the garden. You don’t have to empty your wallet on pricey plant food when you can use these weeds that make good fertilizers!

I clocked up 46 hours in the garden in August this year, up from 34 the year before, so I have clearly been busy one way or another. I don’t include things like preserve making in this total, but nevertheless found time this week to make my first batch of tomato chutney (recipe here). This time last year I had already made 3 batches and had enough tomatoes to make a fourth batch, which is perhaps as well as I may not have enough ripened tomatoes to make the minimum of three batches I need to keep me going till the next tomato season. Not only have they been very much later to establish and ripen than most years, but the beefsteak tomato ‘Burlesque’, that I grow to make things easier for the chutney-making process, is less than half its usual size, either not maturing as normal, or not the correct variety in the first place.

Do you have small black flies living in your house plant compost? Or hovering around your house plants? These are fungus gnats, also known as house plant flies and sciarid flies. They’re mostly harmless – adult gnats cause little or no harm to plants, but they can become a nuisance in the home. Their tiny worm-like larvae live in the top 5-8cm of compost, where they feed on algae, fungi and plant roots. Healthy house plants usually tolerate this minor root damage, but the larvae can harm seedlings or weak plants.

You've likely heard that burying banana peels in your garden is a good way to add important nutrients to the soil to grow healthy plants. Banana peels do contain nutrients, but not as many as you may think. Plus, it's not as simple as placing them in the soil and skipping fertilizer or compost.

Nothing spoils “blissfully lost in the garden” feels like rodents! Be it your fresh lettuce, juicy strawberries, or even cardboard boxes and electrical wires—rats spare none! They are easily the scourge of all your prized garden staples, but we show you how to keep a rat-free garden without hurting them as much as possible!

Bedding plants, such as petunias, pelargoniums, pansies and nicotiana, are easy to grow and care for. They look good grown in hanging baskets and pots, and also work in borders, either used to fill gaps or grown together for a colourful display.

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The value of having compost available for use in the home garden is immeasurable, and the convenience of creating that compost on-site for instant availability adds to the reward. Of course, learning how to successfully compost and creating a process that works for your home and lifestyle can certainly be a challenge. For those with plenty of available material for the composting process, along with enough space, the popular three-bin system allows for maximum efficiency in creating nutrient-rich compost. Constructing or purchasing a three-bin system establishes a time-tested design and organized approach that accelerates composting quickly and consistently, while allowing for three various stages of decomposition in close proximity.

There is no way to sugarcoat the challenges many of us in the Mid-Atlantic region have faced this summer. The inconsistency of rainfall and the extreme high temperatures have greatly impacted our efforts to garden successfully. Even with valiant efforts to apply supplemental irrigation, I have witnessed a wide range of plant material showing signs of drought stress that I have rarely witnessed in my 15-plus years of gardening in this region. To say it is cause for concern would be an understatement. As a result, in the last few months I have been repeatedly asked how we can prepare our beloved gardens to reduce heat and moisture stress for future growing seasons. One answer to this conundrum is to add organic matter to the soil in the form of compost.

Liverworts are tiny plants with flattened leaves that mostly grow in shady places, damp spots, and where soil is compacted and slow to drain. Liverworts can occur in many places, including paths, paving, other hard surfaces, lawns, border soil, in greenhouses, and the surface of compost in pots. There are around 300 different species of liverwort in the UK. It’s often welcomed for the natural look it brings to gardens along with biodiversity benefits, and in many cases, there’s no need to get rid of liverwort. However, in certain situations, such as on the surface of pots of young plants or on paths which have become slippery, liverwort growth may cause problems and will need to be removed.

What is giant hogweed?

Sustainability is at the forefront of most parts of our lives these days, from how to be less wasteful with our food shopping to considering the materials we use in our homes. Gardening is no different, and it's as important to think about the environment there as it is in any other aspect of our lives. In fact, you could argue it's the most important as a healthy, sustainable garden will support the ecosystem and wildlife that should be thriving there. To set you off on the right path, Clare Foster sets out the seven things to consider in order to cultivate a sustainable garden.

Heucheras are shade-loving plants, native to the woodlands of North America. Grown for their foliage, their leaves come in a huge range of colours from red, purple, vivid green and even silver, and they bear attractive flowers in summer, too. Heucheras make excellent ground cover plants, and work well in winter pot displays. Members of thesaxifrage family, heucheras are also known as coral bells and alumroot.

It might seem like a no-brainer what you can pour down a drain, but not every liquid or viscous substance is suitable for household plumbing for a variety of reasons. Some can congeal in and clog up drains while others can damage the pipes, resulting in costly plumbing repairs and replacements.

Pot-grown plants are like caged animals; being confined, they can’t ‘forage’ so they rely totally on us for food. Most compost only supplies ‘starter’ nutrients that are soon used up, so begin feeding plants growing in pots six weeks after potting or repotting.

Your Ultimate Guide to Square Foot Gardening

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Never never plants, Ctenanthe, are tropical jungle plants, native to Central and South America. They’re grown as house plants for their decorative oval leaves, which are striped, sometimes in a herringbone pattern, in dark or light green, yellow or silver, often with a purple or red underside. There are 15 species in the Ctenanthe genus, with plants ranging from the compact Ctenanthe burle-marxii and Ctenanthe setosa to the towering Ctenantheoppenheimiana, which can grow to a metre tall.

Recently, the Home and Garden Information Center (HGIC) has been receiving photos of coneflowers (Echinacea purpurea) that are malformed and green. The plants are infected with aster yellows, a bacterial phytoplasma (a type of bacterium that does not have cell walls). Aster leafhoppers (Macrosteles quadrillineatus) carry the pathogen and infect the plant tissue when they feed on it. They are small olive-green to tan insects with wedge-shaped bodies. Adults are 1/8 in length and have three pairs of spots on their heads.

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I failed to say that the reconfigured rose garden featured yesterday is far from a ‘fait accompli’, and won’t be completed till much later this year or probably into the next. Firstly, I need to do something with the six slabs removed from the central area, the largest of which are 30″ x 18″ and all of them far heavier than they were when the last rose garden layout was established back in 2012. Although they are concrete, they are cast from moulds of real flag stones and there is a pleasing variation between them. We used these extensively when we laid the paved area and many of the paths and, although they were fairly reasonably priced when we first bought them, prices have escalated as we found when planning another project more recently – and hard to source, especially singly. At the moment, I cannot see where we might use them, but I am reluctant to get rid of them and they will need to be stored – which involves moving them… Then there are those nine bags of rubble (already moved down to the front of the house)…fortunately a local friend is happy to take rubble to fill in a boggy area where she stables horses…

Let’s face it: Mulching isn’t a glamorous job. It’s dusty, dirty, and can be downright backbreaking. But despite all the effort involved in the task, mulching your vegetable garden properly at the start of the growing season pays big dividends as the weeks progress. With a 2- to 3-inch-thick layer of mulch in place, trips to the shed for a hoe, cultivator, or hand weeder become few and far between; the hose stays coiled on its reel; veggie roots remain insulated from temperature extremes; and soil-borne fungal spores stay far away from plant leaves. There’s no doubt that the benefits of mulch are many, but the truth is that not all mulches perform the same.

Bougainvilleas

Bacopa is a trailing perennial that is perfect for hanging baskets, containers and providing ground cover at the front of borders. Originally from South Africa, it is grown as an annual in the UK, because it isn’t frost hardy and won’t survive temperatures below 5ºC. It produces a mass of tiny flowers over a long period, from June through to October, in either white, pink or blue.

Sweet and juicy, freshly harvested watermelon is a delicious treat and tastes far superior to what you can buy in the shops. Part of the cucurbit family, watermelon plants look similar to courgette and squash plants, with flat, green and slightly furry leaves followed by yellow flowers and fruit. They can be left to scramble across the ground or trained to climb a frame, where they take up less space. Like other types of melon, watermelons need up to three months of sun and heat to produce ripe fruit, which means success relies on a long, hot summer.