How Does Your Garden Grow? Maintaining a Healthy Garden

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You don’t have to be a keen horticulturist to keep your garden maintained. A few small measures could prevent your backyard from becoming a jungle – or drying out completely. Here are a few tips to help your garden flourish.

Deter pests and weeds

Pests and weeds are the banes of any garden. Whilst you can use chemical insecticides and weed-killers these can often have a negative effect on other wildlife, killing off bees and warding off birds. Weeds are the best dugout but you can use other tricks such as boiling water and vinegar for killing them. To get rid of pests such as slugs and snails, use natural solutions such as salt-spray and chili powder.

Fertilise plants

The solution to overgrown plants is cutting back. Plants that are refusing to grow are a little harder to deal with. Fertiliser maybe your best option. As with pesticides and weed-killers, you should avoid chemicals where possible. There are all kinds of DIY fertilisers to experiment with from Epsom salts to compost tea. You can also get many pre-mixed organic formulas online.

Keep soil moist

When summer comes, don’t just water your plants, water the soil. This will keep your plant’s roots healthy. For gardens in hotter climates, a sprinkler is recommended to save you watering the lawn manually.

Soil can become too wet, becoming waterlogged and causing plants to wilt and leaves to go yellow. This is common with clay soil in the winter. There’s not much you can do to combat this other than transferring plants to a raised bed or to pots. Growing your plants in a greenhouse is another option.

Maintain your pond

Ponds can be a beautiful garden feature but do require a lot of maintenance. Water needs to be regularly filtered either by fitting a waterfall or a filter system. Keeping good air quality in the pond is also important for any fish and there is a huge range of pond air pumps available.

Algae and blanket weed should be taken out to stop other plants such as lilies from being killed off. Some algae are healthy, however, especially in the winter when it provides food for fish.

In winter, try to use a natural de-icing method to allow a hole in the ice for toxins to escape the water. Do not break the ice as this can cause shockwaves to travel through the water that is capable of killing your fish.

Use creative lighting solutions

Plants need light to survive. If your garden is located in the shade you may need to come up with creative methods to keep plants happy. If any obstacles can’t be removed, you may be able to place mirrors around the garden to re-direct light. This can’t substitute direct light but could help plants get a few more rays than they usually would. Raised beds meanwhile may be an option for getting more light to plants.