Can you use banana peels as free fertilizer?

Border plants play an essential role in unifying gardens. They are used to delineate space and accentuate the lines of a landscape, including planting beds and pathways. Border plants bridge the gap between the floor plane of a garden and its plantings, creating a more finished look. The best border flowers for your garden include annuals and perennials that complement their surroundings while guiding the eye through the landscape.

Banana peels have been featured in slapstick comedy as part of pratfalls and silly physical skits. But in reality, these discarded parts of our food are actually very nutritious and have uses far beyond sketch comedy. As food prices jump higher and higher, and we make conscious decisions to prevent waste, the benefits of banana skin in our diet may become not only necessary but desired.

EVERY GARDENER has their obsessions—or maybe a nicer way to say that might be to call it their “signature plants,” the ones that help define their garden. I confess to a serious issue with gold-leaved things. And last time I checked my friend Ken Druse had more than a few plants with variegated leaves of all kinds of daring patterns and hues that catch your eye in his New Jersey garden.

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Header image: Andrew Taylor. Spud Fit/Facebook

Although August is the height of the summer, and it’s worthwhile taking time to stop and smell the roses, the vegetable gardener also has to be aware that autumn is just around the corner. That doesn’t have to be a depressing thought! It just means you need to harvest any crops that won’t survive the first frosts, and that you may want to preserve some so that you can have a homegrown taste of summer during the winter months. You should have some new crops on the way to look forward to, and be thinking about potting up herbs to bring under cover for the winter.

If October starts warm it can provide a nice breathing space, to catch up late harvesting, saving seeds and generally getting the garden ready for the winter. It’s also the time to cover any bare soil, with mulches if necessary, to protect your soil structure from bad weather, and to ensure any tall plants (mainly brassicas) are staked against ‘wind rock’, which can lift their roots out of the soil. You may also need to net brassicas to stop them being munched by marauding pigeons.

Ah, April, a month that gives us leaves on the trees, blossom in the hedgerow, and a headache with its changeable weather. We gardeners would love April to be a season of sunshine and soft showers. But, instead, we need to plan for sleet and hail, or even snow. As the effects of climate change are felt more widely, we may even need to forego thinking of April as a rainy month at all, and just an extension of dry winters. It’s also at least a month before we can be relatively sure that there will be no more frosts.

You’ll hear weather forecasters referring to spring from the beginning of March, as meteorological spring starts on March 1st. The spring equinox, when the days start to get longer than the nights, is around 20th March. Actual signs of spring – warmer days and plant growth – may take longer to appear!

December is another quiet month in the garden, when the bad weather is a good excuse to spend time indoors planning for next year. What worked well this year? What wasn’t as good? What do you want to add/remove/change? Winter is traditionally the time when structural changes are made in the garden, so you could be out there on nice days, building new beds or improving the paths. Try and stay off wet or frozen soil, as compaction will hurt the soil structure. Walking on boards is an option, if you need to be out there.

Fresh from the excesses of Christmas, and with the urge to turn over a new leaf, now might be a good time to tackle getting the garden ready for the season ahead! If you need to make structural changes, such as building or moving beds, or adding/improving paths, then bright days are useful. But, of course, January tends to be cold and wet, and the short days mean gardening is usually confined to the weekends.

February is the month when the keenest gardeners really get going, sowing seeds into heated propagators indoors, perhaps even rigging up the grow lights. They’re aiming to give their tender veg (tomatoes, aubergines, chillies and sweet peppers, for the most part) the longest possible growing season, and to have the earliest crops.