My Top TIME-SAVING Gardening Hacks

we had several comments on the video of my garden saying it must be a nightmare to maintain it must take days and days a week to do it but actually i maintain it on two man days a week i'm one of the man days and dave helps me for the other man days and i like it to be like that i like it to be really streamlined and efficient garden maintenance people think it's very boring subject but i think it's really important because if you get it right you can make the whole thing sing without bags of effort and there are a few key tips that you need in order to get it right lawns are usually the most high maintenance part of a garden they take far more than borders or hard surfaces because they need to be done pretty well every week for most of the growing season nothing else takes that amount of demand on your time so you want to really rationalize your grass and rationalize how you maintain it the top tip of all is if you've got the cash is to get a robotic mer because if you've got a lawma that comes out and does it automatically then obviously it takes no time and effort from yourself apart from getting it serviced once a year and some people say that if they pay someone to mow the lawn they very quickly write off the cost of the lawnmower so really consider that the only thing i don't like with a robotic mower is i don't have the stripes i do quite like the stripes but i have to forego them my lawn has improved in quality since getting robotic mowers because it cuts it every day it just cuts off a very top of the lawn and it leaves it to mulch down and that feeds the soil and so in dry periods it stays much greener than it used to without that sort of myrrh so i really do advocate it and i know a green keeper who did the front lawn doing it everything he should to it he spiked it he fed it he did everything needed fertilize it and then the other lawn he did with the robotic mirror and he said the quality of the grass was better with a robotic mirror the next thing i do is i actually leave some of it longer now you can actually go for a meadow and just cut it twice a year or you can cut it once a month or so and you cut it quite long when you cut grass the more you cut it the more you stimulate the growth so if you just cut it once a month cutting it on the highest mower setting that you can then obviously you're doing far less mowing than otherwise and i love the differentiation between the higher lawn and the moon past it can form really nice patterns or even part hairs with it so that's definitely one to consider another one is changing the type of your mirror normally you cut and you collect it and the emptying and removing the cuttings takes half as much time again as just mowing you can get a mulch mer and this actually mulches up the cuttings into tiny little pieces so they just fall back on the grass and again they feed the soil so you do have better moisture retention soil and the grass goes better in dry periods the downside with the mulch mower is of course that if you leave it for two or three weeks it gets too high for the mower to cope with you need to do it pretty regularly if you've got a mulch mercer just bear that in mind then apart from mowing the edging of a lawn always takes a long time and if you don't have neat edges it does look a bit rough so i always think if you can afford to put in some sort of mowing margin then it just keeps that nice clean edge and then you want the soil to be two or three millimeters higher than the actual paving stone or sleeper whatever you're using so the merge just goes over the top and here i've got paving slab mowing edges i've got granite set mowing edges other gardens i've done sunken railway sleepers as mowing edges so you just see the timber on the top there's all sorts of different permutations you can have and they really do save all that edging up time apart from the different mowing machines you can of course have the alternative type of mowing machine what i call the edible machine which i have out there in the field and the sheep and the cattle maintain the meadow and i love that look it looks quite long and lush in spring and then in the winter it's all shown quite neat and tidy and you see all humps and clumps of the old medieval village that's below the surface obviously you couldn't do it if you had a tiny bit of land but if you've got half an acre or an acre you could consider putting a sheep on there to do it for you providing you know all about keeping sheep so those are good tips to actually reducing the time you spend lawn mowing and that's not to forget the design side so i've got a patch of grass here which is a rectangle and it's a small rectangle and i'm thinking why is that grass why don't i just kill it off put in gravel with a few self-seeding nice plants to liven it up things like sedums and other things and alliums like dry gravel situations eriduron and that saves me mowing at all and i think it's a great tip if you can remove all those fiddly little areas it means moving them over to another bit of land just design them out put in gravel put in a border put in paving put in something else forget mowing and that will save you all the time in the world [Music] many people think that borders are really high in maintenance but i think if you get them right they're certainly wonderful to live with and not too hard work and you need to select the design of your borders to give you the amount of maintenance you want first off before you start your border you need to get rid of all perennial weeds so what i do is i follow it for maybe two or three months in the growing season and i make sure that all the bindweed the ground elder etc the creeping thistles have come up and i've killed them off before i start to plant and if you want to see how to kill perennial weeds go and have a look at my perennial weed video so having established you've got a weed-free border you then want to plant pit plant into the soil now if you've had turf there before you've killed it off then i literally pit plant my plants through the dead sward and people think this is strange i think oh why don't you dig it over but actually the more you dig a salt the more you ruin the soil structure so i think it's really good not to dig up order the other thing when you dig a border you bring up all the weed seeds to the surface the annual weed seeds they have the light and they germinate so i think it's far better off not digging them you if you need to apply goodness then you can put it on top after and the worms will take it down when i then plant the border i will plant them quite densely so if i've got shrubs i'll plant them at two to four per square meter depending on what they are and if they're perennials there'd be something between two and eight per square meter that way they knit over and get a good cover and you don't get the light to help the weed seeds to germinate now is a bit more expensive doing it this way but i often propagate the plants up in my hoarding borders and then i plant them out and that's a very good way to do it so the disadvantage of planting too densely is in a very hot dry summer they can become short of water and so you would need to irrigate a bit more but that rarely happens only when the board is quite new the other slight disadvantage is when you've got them going very close together and they're competing some plants will outperform others but at the rates i've mentioned about four per square meter four to eight for herbaceous you will find that actually there's not such close competition and i always soak container grown plants in water before i plant them and so you get the pot and you actually plunge it in a bucket of water until all the air bubbles have gone so i won't need to water it maybe for two or three weeks unless it's really hot and you want to water them infrequently so the roots get used to chasing the water down i also just take the top surface of compost off the pot because that's where you often find little weeds like bittercress which are rife in plants you get from a nursery so i just scrape them off maybe put them in the bottom of the soil or maybe actually put them in a deep pit somewhere i just don't want weed seeds anywhere near my borders and then i will mulch them the fun bit is designing your borders but you need to know what you want from your board when you're designing it so i've got certain borders that take very little maintenance a year and those are just full of one simple plant and one of my favorites is a comfrey called some phytum hitticott blue and head cut pink and they are so rampageous they just cover the soil they flower beautifully in very early spring late winter the bees love them and can zooming over them and they're just like a green carpet and they're very easy the only thing i sometimes have with some phyton borders is an edge to stop them creeping into the grass so i might have a mowing edge of a stone slab or something otherwise the mowing actually contains them and stops them creeping onto the grass then i have the sort of middle maintenance borders which maybe has four or five different plants within it i have a very simple palette and those are all really good doers plants that flower for a long time and perform well because when you have hundreds of different types of plants in one borders the maintenance involved in stopping one plant swamping another and another plant being succumbed by overbearing neighbors is huge and that's where all the staking and tying and cutting back takes place and that's what takes the labour it's fun and i do like doing that in certain areas but those borders are limited to areas around the house that i see all the year and i love playing and titivating and staking with but the middle range borders are much better in areas that you don't see that often or if you haven't got much time and i use things like lavender and simple ground cover like good types of napita such as midsummer beauty and things like that and they're good stalwarts and they'll perform they'll perform they'll perform you can get that good palette and get it to really sing for you my courtyard borders are slightly higher maintenance i haven't got hundreds of different types of plants i've got a good decent palette of maybe five or six with roses and box and a few other things and then i pep them up with my favorite dahlias which i love my thomas edison which that lovely dark crimson which i often use i've got gladioli plum tart which i plant most years and then i've got cosmos which are annual so they're obviously more work than a perennial and then i add in lots of tulips in the spring and i maybe put in some camasias so i love playing around with that each year i might change it i like to try a different combination and they're my fun borders and i spend more time on those than probably all the other borders in the garden put together and you want to design those borders where you'll see them and love them and have the other more boring borders elsewhere where you don't see them that often [Music] i love hedges they're the sort of green architecture of the garden you can play around with the shapes and the forms they filter the wind and they show plants off at their best but they're hard work or they can be if you've got a lot of them so you want to rationalize them so for the very simplest way to maintain them such as a long hornbeam carpenter specialist as i've got running down the drive i used to cut by hand with a cordless hedge cutter but now i use a tractor-mounted flail mover and this actually just scissors up all the little bits of leaves so it chops them up into a fine mulch and what used to take me a day to cut the whole hedge down the drive a guy with a tractor cuts it in about an hour half an hour so that saves a lot of time and no leaf raking up wonderful some people don't like flails because they say it leaves a jagged end it does have to be fairly level ground i think if you're on a difficult slope it would be difficult to make it nice and consistent the top and i think you need someone who's quite good at it but i do find that the more you cut a hedge with the flail the hedge seems to grow to accommodate it and it seems to improve so i don't think there's a lot of difference cutting it with a flail than by hand and you can also just neaten it up by hand with last minute touches if you need to the bits that perhaps the flail can't get to secondly don't let your hedges get any higher than you need because cutting at height is hard work and more difficult some people have these platforms i use the tripod ladders but i basically like them to keep them as low as i can that fulfills the function so you need to decide the minimum height that you need the hedge to be so that you're giving yourself the least taxing job in cutting it other thing is the type of hedge cutter you use i love the cordless hedge cutters they're much lighter than one that's got a big petrol mower you don't have the actual core the electric wire that you can cut through if you have the ones that are electric driven and i have three different hedge cutters i have a very long one for the high ones i have a sort of medium size one for the middle size hedges and then i have a little one for all the intricate bits which is the lightest of all and that makes it much easier if you've got the right tool for the job that you're doing and finally it's actually collecting all those hedge cuttings it's actually the most painful job of all i think so i use offcuts from a butyl liner the type that you use in a pool and that quite heavy duty fabric you can just lie on the ground and it's a bit like those things that hairdressers put around your neck when you go to stop the hair going down your shirt and when you collect up the trimmings in the butyl liner you can then just tip them into the barrel or big bucket whatever you're using without it flapping all over the place which it does if you use a sheet or something that's much lighter so using those techniques it actually keeps the hedge cutting quite a manageable job when you start a border lots of plants love a really good topsoil but you don't want to put good top salt below about three or four hundred millimeter because the aerobic bacteria will then become anaerobic because there's no oxygen and all sorts of toxins build up which can actually kill plants and so i like to put the goodness on the top and the worms and everything will take it down to the plant roots one of my favorite ingredients is this it's just green waste local authority green waste and it's lovely and thick and black totally weed free very high in potassium so it makes things flower quite well and it's used when they make manufactured topsoil they mix this with quarry washings which is a type of soil and it's a perfect mix and they use it on all olympic parks the disadvantage of this perhaps for some is its ph it might be 7.8 to 8 so it's quite alkaline but the soil will revert back to the natural ph after about three or four years i love it i use it a lot and i buy it by the trailer load and that way it's pretty inexpensive the next one i love and this i get free so this comes from tree surgeons and when they chop trees down with leaves they just shred it all up and they make this lovely mix of wood chips mixed with leaves this is actually quite a high wood content but often you've got about half and half and this is wonderful stuff i don't put it on tender young plants until it's actually been out in the field for about two or three months because you do get a lot of tannin in the wood which can leech out and make tannic acid and actually hurt the plant so if you leave it for two or three months on on delicate plants and then just whop it on as a mulch to improve the soil and it will quite quickly break down and form lovely organic matter with nutrients lots of gardeners used to think that when you put on materials like this to the soil that it actually robbed the soil of nitrogen as it broke down but current thinking by top soil scientists is if you've got fairly healthy soil anyway it doesn't do that you needn't worry this here is strush this is another mulch this is made from straw it's mineralized straw it's very light it's quite nice and uniform and i often use it in the vegetable garden to keep weeds down it seems the heat help keep slugs and snails off fairly expensive because it's a manufactured product weed free obviously helps keep the weeds down and i like using it a lot it's very nice stuff the next one is relatively new to some gardeners and it's called digestate and it's made in the same way that cows stomachs digest their food so they put into these big fats lots of grass maize things like that they add the enzymes that occur or similar ones that occur in the cow's stomach and it's all broken down and a gas is given off now the gas then goes to power plants and they get paid for that and the end result is this so it's it's similar to cows manure in a way and if you smell it you've got a little bit of a width of carbon you're not exactly the same but you can tell it's of that origin and it's weed free it's quite a popular product it's definitely gathering momentum it's relatively inexpensive it's quite alkaline like most compost but again it will get back to the natural soil level after a time three or four years or so so i think it's got a lot of merit and i i use this too the next two are barks now people often use bark to mulch the top of a border to keep the weeds down then you've got the usual two bark mulches here and i've got this one here which is a fairly fine bark which looks quite attractive and then i've got this one here which is a much coarser bark now i favor the corsa bark because the core spark actually takes much longer to break down and when you've got weed seeds and they float onto the surface they will actually germinate sometimes into the finer box much more difficult to germinate into the core sparks the other thing with the finer barks is they tend to absorb moisture and so you have this moist layer sitting on top of the soil and so the plants roots tend to grow up to the surface and i want them to go down to the ground so that when it's dry they're nice and deep below the soil and they can find their own moisture i don't want to encourage the roots to come up to the top of the surface so if i'm using a bark then i would definitely go for this coarser grade but in any case when you apply mulch you should make sure the soil is moist before you apply it so you're actually trapping the moisture underneath never apply it when it's dry or it's much more difficult for the rain to get through and all these i will put on a minimum of 50 ml deep if i've got rare a really thin soil i would go even deeper and you'll find when i put on a good depth of any of these products on my soil particularly the green waste it very quickly gets accumulated into the soil by the use of worms and things like that i never dig it in because digging the soil does ruin or change or damage the soil structure i always just leave it on top and i think that's very important and most top soil scientists say of that opinion

Channel: Bunny Guinness

Views: 187,370

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Id: yAicwdRUwBw

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020