Better and greener gardens
EVEN if you have a postage stamp-sized bit of green, you can make a pretty show. Also, green space is cooler than heat-reflecting cement, and you encourage birds, bees and other pretty and colourful natural creatures. The trick is buying expert advice and labour-saving tools.
Enthusiastic amateur gardeners will love spending hours in their green space but if you’re not sure how much time you want to spend weeding, watering, snipping and generally labouring, then a landscape gardener can help you plan a garden that suits your lifestyle.
Make a list of what you want (low maintenance, to grow your own fruit or a place for the cats to play safely) and then go and see what your options are. Paying to get it set up professionally will also save you from making rookie mistakes.
If you go out a lot or are terrible at remembering when to water, put in a sprinkler system.
Ask for one that can sense moisture, especially rain. Then, when it’s monsoon season, you’re not flooding your garden and paying a lot of money for water that you don’t need. Run it early in the morning so that the water soaks into the soil instead of evaporating into the air when the sun hits the garden.
When you invest in a mower, buy one that has a shredder attachment. This chops the leaves and grass finely so that you can spread it over the lawn (or your compost heap) rather than dispose of it.
When these little shreds decompose, they release water and nutrients back into the soil. This means less fertiliser to buy and fewer bags of useful natural waste going into landfills.
Remember that if you put in a water feature, such as a koi pond or a little place for the kids’ goldfish to live happily, a gardener may not be the best person to speak to. Instead, visit your local aquarium shop and find out what you need to think about.
Ask about what sort of general maintenance time you have to put in, what common problems arise, what happens during monsoon, whether your goldfish will attract certain predators, and then speak to someone with the feature you have your eye on and ask all those questions again.
Tip: It usually pays to have a professional put in a water feature, especially as factors such as sunshine, breeze direction and other natural elements can play a big role in maintenance.