Garden equipment & products

5 top tips for a water-saving garden

Although we’re still in the depths of winter and the gardening season is yet to get underway, there’s still plenty you can do to be more water-conscious before your garden wakes up in the coming weeks. Mulching beds and borders is a great way to lock moisture in the soil, and of course installing a water butt (or two!) will make the most of any rainy weather and help to save water for when we really need it in spring and summer. And if you’re planning any major landscaping, consider the benefits of better drainage.

Read on for five top tips to help you save water in winter.

Snowdrops are nodding in the borders, the first tips of daffodils and crocus are showing through the soil, and the garden is still half-asleep. It’s a good point in the year to have a think about the structure and landscaping of your garden, and make some preparations which will improve water conservation, ready for the coming growing season.

Here are 5 things to consider when you’re planning your 2024 garden:

1. Hard surfaces

Does your garden drain the rain? And do you wonder why your street or driveway keeps flooding? It’s because too many hard surfaces, driveways and paved over gardens aren’t allowing rainwater to drain away properly.

monoblock paths and drive ways drain poorly and pool water
paving, tarmac and concrete are also less porous
additional water flows into street drains, putting pressure on the sewer network – that’s why localised flooding can occur, affecting people’s homes and gardens

So what can you do instead? Keep hard surfaces in your outdoor space to a minimum – and go for grass or gravel when you’re landscaping. If you’re building a new driveway, patio or path – or planning an upgrade – then choose permeable paving. Gravel is especially cheap and you can plant into it easily. Consider also retaining as much grass in your front garden as possible – it’s better for biodiversity and it holds rainwater, preventing runoff.

2. Avoid artificial grass

When your grass is living, there’s life in your grass – and the rest of your garden benefits too.

grass and the soil below it supports a huge ecosystem of insects, worms, nutrients and micro-organisms
daisies, dandelions and other wildflowers in your lawn are food for bees, flies and other pollinators
it’s a feast for the senses – walking barefoot on grass, the smell of a freshly mown lawn, the sound of bees buzzing on the flowers, a lush, green oasis of calm

Artificial grass may seem like a good alternative – but it has a really big carbon footprint caused by manufacture, transport and installation, and it involves huge areas of plastic which can’t be recycled.

Although it’s designed to drain, water runoff can be a problem with fake grass, as doesn’t absorb rain in the same way as soil; plus, micro-plastics are washed into the ground, polluting it for centuries. Although it seems like an easier, low-maintenance option, artificial lawns have serious implications for the environment, including water conservation.

3. Install a water butt

Now is actually a great time to think about how to reduce your overall water use – a few preparations will set you up for this year’s growing and reduce the likelihood of flooding during the wetter months. It’s the perfect time to install a water butt, to collect any rainfall in the coming weeks – it should be nice and full come spring! You can watch our video on installing a water butt here.

4. Spring bare root planting

Spring, like autumn, is a great time to get new plants in the ground, giving them time to put down roots and reduce the need for extra watering when it’s warm again. Many are sold bare-root during autumn and winter, which often reduces the packaging required too. Bare-root is just what it sounds like – the plants are sold without pots and soil, and it doesn’t cause them any harm because they’re dormant. They often benefit from a good soak in a bucket of water before being placed into their planting spot with some fresh compost.

You could consider filling those gaps in your borders with more drought-tolerant planting too – for example, scented Lavender, soft Stachys, bee-friendly Echinops and swooshy Stipa are all great examples of sun-lovers which don’t need much watering, even in a heatwave.

5. Mulching

Mulching your beds and borders is a one of the top tasks to undertake in spring – there are so many benefits for your garden, including helping to lock moisture in the soil, reducing the need for watering. Mulching simply involves spreading a layer of organic matter on the surface of the soil – this can be compost, spent soil from tubs and containers, leaf mould, grass clippings, chipped wood or bark or any other dead plant material. The mulch will gradually be broken down over time by weather and insects, and absorbed into the soil, making it healthier and introducing nutrients to help feed your plants naturally.

Mulching with homemade compost is even better, as it’s a really circular way to re-use the clippings, prunings and old plant material you’ve collected over the course of the previous year. Allowing these to break down in a compost bin or heap will provide you with nutrient rich mulch, returning the goodness back into your garden.

Exit January… enter February

Did you feel it? The subtle season shift?

Yesterday, on the 1st of February, the air felt different. The sky was a bit lighter, the greens were a bit greener. It was as if – once January was finally out the door – the world could breathe a sigh and get on with the business of spring.

There are only very early signs: a few little snowdrops nodding on their stalks, fat shoots of daffodils poking out of the soil and leaf litter, an extra few minutes of daylight each afternoon. I even heard the sound of a woodpecker hammering on a tree in the woods – which always gives me a thrill because it’s one of the earliest spring sounds.

These are just little things, small signs, and we are still very much in the depths of winter here in Scotland – but it’s enough to inspire hope and a sense of anticipation about the new season that’s around the corner.

Spring preparations

While we wait out the last blasts of the winter winds and (no doubt) icy, cold days still to come I’m getting busy with preparing indoors for the growing season. That means sorting my seeds: checking which open packets still have seeds in them, assessing their likelihood of germination against the suggested expiry date, reminding myself of those plants I want to grow again, and those which I’ve lost enthusiasm for.

One of the beautiful things about growing a garden is that you can change it up every year if you like – or keep things exactly the same. Or something in between! There are some flowers and vegetables that are on my ‘must grow’ list, including tomatoes, dahlias, sweet peas and cosmos. I grow these every year and I mix a few favourites with new varieties and colours.

Then I also look down the notes and lists in my phone or saved photos on Instagram which remind me about new plants I want to grow or new varieties to try. I think about the colours I’m most drawn to – I like to choose shades which complement each other and at the moment I’m loving soft pinks, creams, apricots but also pairing this with a dash of dramatic dark red or purple.

For example, I love cosmos and will nearly always grow white ‘Purity’ as it’s such a fantastic, reliable plant and great in cut flower arrangements. But this year I’m very excited to try ‘Apricotta’ as I’ve admired the many Instagram photos I’ve seen other growers posting last summer! It looks like a gorgeous soft colour which will probably vary between blooms and change as the petals age, which is often the way with coloured cosmos.

So, now I’ve got an idea of the seeds I already have, and I like to arrange these (and any new additions as they arrive in the post) into the months I’ll plan to sow them so that I can keep track of what to do and when. It makes it much easier when I have an opportunity to get into the greenhouse to simply glance through the collection and pick the ones I want or need to sow that month.

January and February’s selection is always much smaller than March and April! But there’s no rush – for me, the timings are more of a guide and way to prioritise rather than a hard and fast rule. And it’s also important to keep an eye on the weather – I may hold off some of the sowings in February and March in order to give more plants a better start later in the spring as they will catch up fast in warmer, sunnier conditions.

In the meantime, I’m browsing some of my favourite seed suppliers to fill the gaps in my wish list and look out for any good bargains.

In terms of other indoor prep, I also usually draw a plan of the raised beds in The Secret Garden and figure out what I should plant and where, with a loose idea of crop rotation. If I’m feeling really nerdy I’ll open my spreadsheets (Airtable in fact) and update the plants and seeds I’ve got in stock – I might even start a mood board of colours for my sweet peas and dahlias!

Most of these plans will probably change and be adapted as the season goes, but it always feels good to start off with a plan – and it’s something enjoyable and constructive to do when the days are still short or the weather is, as they say round here, “blowing a hoolie” and making it difficult to get outside.

What I’m looking forward to growing in 2024

Here are some of the flowers I can’t wait to see in flower in my garden this year:

Cosmos ‘Double Click Cranberries’ – I resisted growing these for ages but sowed some last year and instantly fell in love with them; gorgeous deep pink coloured flowers, a good size with little frilly double petals – like a jewel in your garden.

Sweet pea ‘Juliet’ – I usually go for pinks and purples (and have plenty of these this year too!) but I was drawn to the soft cream-apricot colour of these, so I’m giving them a try.

‘Amazing Grey’ poppies – they look a bit weird in photos but when I saw these in real life at Gardeners World Live not only were they a mesmerising grey-red-purple colour, they were heaving with bees! I managed to resist buying one then and there, and ordered seeds instead to grow my own!

Calendula ‘Sunset Buff’ – these grew in huge clumps at Hospitalfield where I’m a garden volunteer and they are the prettiest soft peach-pink. A lovely alternative to the more common bright orange varieties and they just caught my eye every time I visited.

Dahlia ‘Café de Paris’ – related to the Insta-popular ‘Café au Lait’ dahlia, this one has a similar shape with a soft pink blush to the petals – it looks absolutely gorgeous.

Other good stuff…

📖 I can’t wait to get started on Arthur Parkinson’s latest book The Flower Yard: Planting a Paradise. I want to do more container growing this year and Arthur has the best eye for combinations of plants which also benefit pollinators and wildlife – I’m certain I’ll be inspired.

🧤 More spring prep – I’m ordering more gloves from Niwaki. These are my favourite light gloves with a nice neat fit which makes it easier to weed or do more fiddly work with them on – I dislike bulky gloves. I’m ordering two pairs this time as I lost one of my existing pair and have been bereft ever since!

👩🏻‍🌾 I love the variety of international horticultural jobs in this list from Mr Plant Geek. It really shows the variety of roles and skills you can combine in the world of horticulture – so check it out if you are entering the industry or fancy a career change.

Finally… are you going to this? I’m tempted 🤔 The brand new RHS Urban Show seems like it will step away from the usual, more traditional ideas of gardening with its focus on urban and indoor growing and an emphasis on wellbeing. I’d be interested to see if the kind of gardens and exhibits they will have on show are realistic and achievable for all or simply a token nod to houseplants and balcony gardens… could be interesting!

Garden Goodies @ GPE 2020

Last week I attended the Garden Press Event in London for the first time – this is an event organised to allow the horticulture industry to come together so that journalists can view the latest products, find out about new campaigns and generally share information and news. It was a whistlestop tour of all the big names in the industry, plus lots of smaller and emerging businesses with new and interesting products to bring to the market. Not to mention initiatives like National Children’s Gardening Week and Garden Day which aim to raise the profile of gardening generally.

There were a few items which particularly caught my attention, so here’s my list of Top 5 Garden Goodies from the GPE 2020:

Nemaknights – I had spotted this advertised in a magazine and then promptly forgot what it was called, so I was delighted to find NemaKnights had a stall, and quizzed them on this potentially transformative product! Essentially it’s nematodes in granular form which you can shake onto the soil as and when you need it. It’s a biological pest control which is child, pet and wildlife friendly and targets slugs and snails, although it’s also available for vine weevils, ants and sciarid flies. If you’ve used nematodes before you’ll know that up until now they’ve been a bit fiddly to use – with a short shelf life, they’re kept in the fridge then you’ve got to add water, mix and water into your soil. Nemaknights seems to eliminate the fuss, making it much easier to use a pesticide-free solution to an age-old problem. I’m looking forward to trying this as we do have many slugs in our garden – I’d also be keen to use it for fungus gnats because this is the time of year they tend to reappear, when my windowsills are full of germinating seed trays!

Quadgrow – another product I was very taken by was the Quadgrow by Greenhouse Sensation. This is a self-watering planter, ideal for crops such as tomatoes, peppers, aubergines or courgettes, and can be used in the greenhouse, polytunnel or on a patio. It promises to keep plants at just the right moisture level for around 14 days using a wicking system, resulting in 2x bigger harvests compared to grow bags or pots. I can see this working well for my tomatoes – or possibly the aubergines and courgettes which are currently only seedlings… so watch this space!

Claire Austin’s Book of Perennials – it was great to speak to Claire Austin herself who was there to promote her newly revised Book of Perennials. I had read about her most recent venture The Sarn in February’s Gardens Illustrated and loved the idea of opening a pub with a plant nursery out the back! Beer and plants – what more could you want?! And I was lucky enough to take away a copy of the book, which I am certain will fuel my daydream of one day owning my own independent nursery. The book was first published in 2015 and has been revised to include 180 new varieties with extended features on peonies and irises. It’s full of advice on choosing and caring for perennials, and how to plant them together. Plus there are 700 plants listed – a perennial lovers paradise.

Honeyfield’s – this is a company producing wild bird food and associated feeders, nest boxes etc. The brand is owned by Marriages, which makes pet food and animal feed, and is now an authority on environmentally friendly wild bird care. Honeyfield’s stands apart from other suppliers in its approach to sourcing seed and sustainability – it’s the first supplier of Fair to Nature bird seed in the UK, which means it’s commited to using cereals and other feeds from farms which grow crops to sustain farmland bird species. So Honeyfield’s not only feeds garden birds, but also looks after those in the countryside too. Not only that, but their packaging is recyclable and they encourage consumer to use a refillable ‘Tub for Life’ for zero-waste shopping. I’ll be popping one of their Easy Clean Seed Feeders out into the garden shortly and I’m certain the local birds are going to love it! Check out Honeyfield’s excellent range of feeding guides here and their brilliant Bird Bites videos, which cover a host of different wild bird care topics.

Activearth – I was very intrigued by this new product, which claims to supercharge your soil. As the owner of some under-performing raised beds, I’m currently on the hunt for ideas to help increase the nutrient levels of my soil and improve the health of the plants I grow in them. Activearth is an organic pellet which provides the soil with 4 essential minerals (Magnesium, Calcium, Hydrogen and Potassium) plus beneficial soil bacteria, to improve fertility and plant growth in a slow release format. Scattered over the growing area, Activearth promises to transform the soil ‘from compacted and dormant to biologically active and nutrient-rich’. This, I like the sound of. So I will try the small sample I’ve got and see if there are any significant improvements – it sounds like a magic formula, and it smells like biscuits! Is it too good to be true? I hope to find out and report back…

Peat free compost

I was recently sent a couple of sample bags of peat-free compost from Westland* – in fact, they turned up shortly before Christmas – cue much head-scratching as I tried to work out what on earth kind of huge, heavy present had I forgotten about ordering…

The two kinds are New Horizon All Plant compost and New Horizon All Veg compost – both claim to be 100% sustainable, natural & peat-free compost. Now, I will confess that up until now I haven’t been a huge fan of peat-free compost, although this is very likely because I’ve bought poor quality stuff. The last bag I had was dry, woody and hard to handle – I didn’t have a very good experience of growing dahlias in it last year so it really put me off. However, I’m fully aware of the issues around peat, so I’m very keen to find a good quality (and hopefully good value) brand which will be as good for my plants as it is for the environment.

So I recently gave the first New Horizon bag a try – the All Plant version – for some pots of bulbs and for sowing some early seeds**. In contrast to the previous variety of peat-free compost I tried, this stuff is lovely and soft, it’s dark in colour and nice to work with – I would have a hard time distinguishing it from ordinary compost containing peat. So, first impressions are good.

My current seed-sowing mix: New Horizon All Plants peat free compost plus a trowelful of grit and a couple of handfuls of perlite

I will report back a little later in the season once I’ve raised some seeds and used it for containers but I’m expecting good things and I’m looking forward to trying the veggie version too. I recently had a conversation on The Scottish Garden Podcast with Ken Cox, who was quite forthright with his views on peat and how it may not be the black-and-white issue it’s portrayed in the media. I found his views really interesting and I do think it’s sensible for gardeners to do their bit in avoiding the use of peat where there’s a suitable substitute. So I’m already hoping these are products I’ll be able to use again.

For more discussion about peat and peat-free compost, you could listen to the Roots and All budcast on Going Peat Free with John Walker (scroll down about 2/3 of the way down the page) or there’s some useful advice on peat free growing for houseplants in this episode of On the Ledge. And Garden Organic has good info on peat free on this page, along with great tips on the best mixes for various growing media.

The 2020 growing season is off to a good start!

*This isn’t a sponsored post or anything – I was simply offered the chance to try some of this compost, so I took it! I hope it’s interesting for others to read about my experiences of this new product.

**So what have I sown so far in 2020? Not much, as it’s still only January! But I’ve started a couple of varieties of sweet peas and I also wanted to get a good early start on some snapdragons, which need a long growing season I believe. I’ve also fired up the propagator and popped in some Verbena bonariensis (I want loads more of this in my front garden!) and some Stipa tenuissima, which is great for pots and borders too.

Best kit – top 5

Well the weather is still deeply disappointing here. I look on Instagram and see photos of daffodils, anemones, primroses and even some tomatoes beginning to flower! And then I look out the window and see grey, brown, damp and a chicken coop slowly turning into s a swimming pool. I must keep reminding myself that even without the grim wintery weather, our growing season is a good 2-4 weeks behind many other parts of the UK…

While I wait out this particular wintry blast (yep, it’s actually snowing again here) I thought I’d share with you some of by best bits of kit – the gardening tools I love the most or find indespensible.

Thermal gardening gloves. I have quite dry skin and these have been a hand-saver all winter – I’m still using them now while the weather is still a bit on the nippy side. They’re lined with soft, cosy material and genuinely keep my fingers warm. This makes them a bit thicker so they’re not ideal for fiddly jobs but for general digging, moving, lifting bags of compost or whatever they’re great and fairly waterproof too so your hands don’t freeze off when the hose drips all over the place.
Wooden tools. I love these mainly because they’re a thing of beauty. I am drawn to certain materials – wood, corduroy and I’m a total sucker for tan leather. I love these so much I bought matching loppers and shears. I wish I could say I have a set of well-loved wooden-handled tools handed down by a relative or the head gardener of a huge estate, but these were simply bargains in TK Maxx! They may not have the heritage but they look wonderful and I feel like I will care for them more because of it. Hand tools tend to end up a bit rusty and rickety for me – I will confess I don’t usually clean and sharpen them regularly the way you’re supposed to. These look so simple and refined it’ll be easy to give them a wipe down or sharpen them up – I’m sure of it!
Propagator This model is a 52 cm Stewart Essentials electric propagator which I picked up for just over £20 during the last Black Friday sale. It’s not thermostatically controlled but as I use the rear sun room as a sort of indoor greenhouse it keeps my seeds at a good temperature for germination in a room where the temperature can fluctuate quite a lot, especially at night when it’s pretty cold. I am currently trying to germinate my pelargonium seeds in there and they’re taking AGES. I’ve also have very limited success with astrantia – only two seedlings so far. But I think this is down to my choice of tricky-to-grow plants rather than the propagator! I’m not very patient and need the space in that propagator for other seeds so I think I will very soon cut my losses and move these out in favour of something that will grow much easier.
Boots. These are my beloved and very scruffy gardening boots. I’ve had them for years, they’re still reasonably comfy but not very waterproof. However when I’m wearing them I feel in ‘gardening mode’ – I feel like I can dig and sow and weed and do garden-y things because I’m in my Gardening Boots.
iphone. Truly indespensible in the garden for me. Obviously it’s useful if anyone needs to get hold of me, I also take photos to post to my Instagram feed, check sowing times or names of plants, or for various bits of gardening advice if I come across something I’m unsure about. I also really love to listen to podcasts while I’m in the garden or greenhouse, and my podcast library is rapidly expanding – everything from Gardeners’ Question Time to Womens Hour to Adam Buxton to On The Ledge. I’ve added quite a few more gardening podcasts recently, including this new one from Andrew O’Brien and Laeticia Maklouf. I find them so useful and interesting – I like to absorb more garden knowledge through my ears and into my brain as I’m getting my hands dirty in the soil!

Julianne Robertson

writer | communications consultant | garden media specialist