Highlights from April’s RHS Garden Magazine

The Garden, the monthly RHS Magazine is a veritable goldmine of gardening and horticultural information.  Browsing through the April edition, I have picked out a few nuggets of useful information to share.

1. Before you buy compost, check the ingredients label (p10)

This is something I was enlightened to a while ago and something I strongly recommend. When you go food shopping it is fairly likely you will be checking the ingredients label on anything you haven’t bought before but have you ever checked the ingredients label on a bag of compost?  Well it is worth doing (and you will be surprised how often you will struggled to find the ingredients). However the key thing is try and when you do aim for peat free compost or at least choose a compost with the least peat in it.

2. You can use less water for hanging baskets and get the same results (p13)

It is easy to under water a hanging basket but you may also be using way more water than you actually need.  Not that the plants will necessarily mind but as water is such a precious resource, a recent RHS study showed that baskets given about half as much water still produced the same number of flowers.

3. Dig in one bucket of compost/organic matter per square meter when preparing your veg. patch (p34)

It is always a bit difficult to know how much compost/organic matter to add when preparing a veg. bed but it doesn’t get much easier than a bucket per square metre.

4. Try infusing your gin with botanicals from your own garden (p82)

Ah now we are talking!  Before shelling out an arm and a leg on some posh infused gin, you can just make your own.  With a good quality dry gin and plants you are bound to have in your garden (for example Lemon Thyme) you could soon be sipping your own delicious house gin.

5. There are tame varieties of Comfrey worth adding to your garden (p24) 

Comfrey can be a bit of devil in the garden wandering all over the show however it is a magnet for bees and butterflies so isn’t all bad.  The good news is there are some well behaved varieties available so everyone is happy!

6. When clearing blanket weed, old leaves etc. from a pond, leave the material next to the pond so any creatures can make their way back (p78)

A pond and its plant life are always a haven for a multitude of creatures however if you need to turf out some of the plants, just leave the material next to the pond for a couple of days just so the wildlife can make its way back home again.