A gardening columnist’s three goals for 2022
This New Year, I’m skipping the traditional triumvirate – get fit, lose weight, drink less – to focus on the garden. My resolutions are these:All too often plants and plantings don’t turn out the way we’d hoped. They are too big, too small, wrong colour, wrong habitat, sick – and sometimes dead. And even if the individual plants are fine on their own, their incompatibility with their neighbours may be causing our visions of loveliness to fall flat.
I’ll triage unhealthy plants before committing to trying to save them. Is failure to thrive easily remedied, with a boost of Gogo Juice or Seasol and a bucket of water, or have I just tried to grow the wrong plant in the wrong place? I’ll make a hard-headed decision about treatment based on the importance of the plant to the garden – and the gardener. Not all plants deserve nursing.
And when the lovely vision fails to materialise I’ll experience no guilt as I toss the failing plant/plants into the compost and begin to dream a new, more realistic, scheme.This year, I give myself permission to fail in the garden, change my mind, hate the thing I used to love and ditch what doesn’t make me happy.Garden designer Michael Cooke recently told me he’s been keeping a garden journal for the past 30 years.
Here’s my to-do list so far: Grow something to eat. Reduce emissions by mowing the lawn with a hand mower and banishing other petrol-powered tools. Plant small shrubs to provide habitat for small birds. Increase the plant diversity in the garden to increase biodiversity. Keep the birdbath spotlessly clean to avoid spreading feather and beak diseases among avian visitors. Mulch with a variety of sizes to encourage soil microbial diversity.
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