SO, you have done your baskets and containers with summer bedding plants or maybe planted your veg patch. Isn`t it about time you start to enjoy the fruits of your labour? Gardening shouldn't be about jobs or chores, it's an extension of your house (in fact I'm typing this right now in the garden).
Make the most of your garden with a few ideas to transform it into a true extension of your home.
Invest in lighting like "up lighters" in your garden – this will introduce a dramatic dimension, for example to illuminate a favourite tree or architectural shrub. This casts shadows and creates drama and will make you look at your garden design in a different way, maybe including more architectural plants in the future.
Strings of lights are not just for Christmas trees, these can be strung along fences or walls to define borders and "frame" your garden. They are also great to wrap around trees to define the tree shape – I do this to my Japanese maple in the winter months to accentuate the shape of the tree – this gives a bright magical effect to ordinary trees and bushes. This looks great when you invite your friends round for a BBQ this weekend (fingers crossed). If you do decide to include lighting with mains electric get an electrician to install a weather-proof outside socket. Solar lighting has improved so much in recent years and there is a huge range of lighting products, including amazing pots.
Introduce a heat source – buy a chiminea, firepit or brazier – there is nothing like sitting in front of a open, crackling fire sipping a warm drink. Using good, dry logs in the burners will last for hours; you can still entertain friends well into the autumn and winter months. Clearly, heat sources and children don't mix.
Another underrated feature of a great garden is wildlife. I have written about how to introduce wildlife into your garden using plants and trees but cover all "bases" by installing a birdhouse or bird feeders, hedgehog home, bat box and bee hotels. The times I've caught myself staring at the bees and birds flying around my garden knowing they are here because I've done everything I can to attract them.
In many, many gardens I visited last and this year, I noticed a lack of these elements that could prolong the time in your garden.
A great plant to use with lighting is fatsia japonica; this broad leaf, evergreen, easy-to-grow plant looks almost luminous when a light source is shone through the leaves.
A plant you should include in your garden to encourage wildlife is cotoneaster – a versatile plant as ground cover, wall shrub, tree or free-standing shrub, any variety is suitable – the flowers attract bees and the berries later in the season are a food source for birds.
Thinking of having a BBQ this weekend? The must-have herbs are rosemary, thyme and sage. I'm a big advocate of using fresh herbs in cooking and a BBQ is ideal for these woody herbs. A small sprig of rosemary can transform a chicken breast.
New for this week – "Problem of the week" – I was sent a photo and asked to identify it. These are scale insects and it seems a lot of gardeners have them this year. A difficult but not impossible to get rid of problem. The fool-proof solution is (if you have the patience) use a small glass bottle and lightly crush the scale insects' brown shell, then spray with a systemic insecticide all over the leaves of the plant and the area where the scale insect is located, normally the stems and branches. The insecticide will sink into the plant and work its way around the system of the plant so, even if you have missed crushing a couple of the blighters with the bottle, when they feed off the sap of the plant they will be poisoned.
