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6 things not to do when gardening
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don’t mow
What a waste of time this is. You devote enormous efforts to making the grass grow – watering, fertiliser, weed treatments – and then once or twice a week you chop it all down again. Doesn’t make sense. Leave the grass longer. Or have a wild flower meadow. Do something !
don’t dig
A lot of effort here. You dig your vegetable patch, and then use half of it for walking on when you tend your growing crops. Make life simple by laying out permanent paths so that all your “patch” can be reached from a path. And when I say permanent I mean: just lay out the cheapest possible paving slabs as your path – directly on top of the weeds and grass you can’t be bothered to dig up. Line underneath with plastic fabric if you like to stop weeds coming through the cracks. With this layout you can keep all the little parcels of land loose and uncompacted.
don’t weed
Tricky – you don’t want to fight nature (see below) but it might not be quite right to let the weeds take over. So compromise – make sure that your ground is fully covered by plants that you want. Don’t leave bare soil – that’s what the weeds want
don’t use your own compost
A potential disaster area this one. If you look carefully through your compost you will find hundreds of little white, round, glistening eggs. These are slugs and snails eggs and will repay your efforts to raise them by eating your plants. Make your compost if you like but don’t use it. Better by far to use composted municipal waste or farmyard manure.
don’t use insecticides
If you want a really good crop of greenflies (aphids) then spray insecticide early in the season and wait for the result. You will have thousands of really nice greenflies, which otherwise would have been eaten by the ladybird larvae, which you knocked out when you sprayed. The trick works because the ladybirds are on a longer lifecycle than the greenfly, and their population recovers more slowly. I’ve stopped spraying insecticide, and after nature had time to recover have suffered very little from insect attack – just occasional bursts of caterpillars (pick them off, there’s rarely very many) and aphids on the growing tip of broad beans (just pinch out the tips – it doesn’t matter the bean pods will have already formed below ).
don’t fight nature
It’s a waste of time, and long term nature usually wins. There’s a brilliant book by Mark Winston called Nature Wars which is captivating reading and which covers exactly this ground. But the important thing for you is to able to defend yourself against your critics when you leave untidy patches in your garden. You just say that you’re not trying to battle against nature. And you would be right.
Don’t …………….er
I couldn’t think of the last one, but YOU can. Please write !
Chas and Daff write about new landscaping topics at www.landscaping.com where there’s more information on similar themes. Please visit and write your “dont”.
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