Have you caught the gardening bug yet this year?
With Spring well underway and National Gardening Week starting today, lots of us will be thinking about sprucing up the garden. Whether you want to just tidy things up a bit, introduce some new plants, or plan a big garden project, it’s always really inspiring to take a look at what other people are up to.
To help you with your garden plans for the year, some of the UK’s top home and garden bloggers have joined forces to share their ideas for garden projects. Read on for my selection, plus more brilliant ideas from the others.
SOW A MINI WILDFLOWER MEADOW
With 60% of the UK’s wildlife species seeing decline over the last fifty years, it’s pretty obvious that nature needs our help. If you’d like to make your garden more wildlife-friendly, sowing wildflowers is a great option.
Wildflowers provide food for pollinating insects, wild birds and bats, as well as dense shelter for other small animals. They’re pretty amazing from a gardener’s perspective too: they’re fast-growing, low-maintenance, help to control weeds, and look fabulous. We found sowing wildflowers a really fun, easy gardening activity which the whole family was able to get involved with, and all you need is a packet of seeds.
GROW VEGETABLES IN CONTAINERS
We’re well into April, which means the growing season is very much underway and you can really get cracking with sowing seeds. You may not have an allotment or a large vegetable plot in the garden, but if you’d like to have a go at growing your own there are lots of vegetables that can be grown really succesfully in containers.
As well as being very space-efficient, growing container vegetables has the added bonus that it’s easy to get the kids involved; and of course you also get fabulously tasty homegrown veggies as well! Full post here.
MAKE NEW PLANTS FOR FREE
If your garden borders are looking bare, with great patches of empty soil, then this is the garden project for you.
Lifting and dividing plants while they are dormant in early Spring is a brilliant way to create new plants for free, and it’s also great if you know anyone who is getting started on a new garden or border and needs some free plants. It’s really easy and you can do it with pretty much any perennial plants (ones that die back and come again year after year). What’s not to like?!
INSPIRING GARDEN PROJECTS – GREAT IDEAS FROM FELLOW HOME & GARDEN BLOGGERS:
Cathy from Wishful Wonderings has been looking for inspiration and creating a herb box for her small garden.
Becky has 3 lovely garden projects to share, a secret garden, making a herb planter and flower pressing.
Over at Fresh Design Blog, Rachel has ideas for making your garden bird-friendly, planting sunflower seeds and essential spring weeding and pruning jobs to do now.
Penny has three easy but great fun projects children will enjoy helping with, she has been making miniature gardens, creating a scarecrow and planting wild flowers.
Stephanie at Life at 139a has two posts on how giving your garden furniture a scrub and revamp can work wonders as well as tips on how to repot your houseplants.
Have we inspired you to get out in the garden? Let me know what you get up to!
Thanks for the reminder to lift and divide plants, I have a new border I need to populate and this is such a thrifty way to mirror what already works in the garden!
Ah that’s a perfect candidate for free plants! Have fun 🙂
Some lovely ideas, I especially love the wildflowers and all the wildlife they attract. I love to grow vegetables in pots especially as I have limited space in my garden.
It’s amazing how versatile containers can be isn’t it – once you start experimenting it’s a bit addictive!
Love the making plants for free!! It’s scary the first time you do it but plants are often resilient things so that’s always a relief! Enjoy #NationalGardeningWeek 🙂
Yes it is a bit scary – although taking a bread knife to a big ball of roots is quite satisfying too!
That’s a really useful tip about lifting and dividing, something I tend to forget about.
I’m a big fan of growing plants in containers – however small a space you have, you can grow something edible!
I only really started dividing my plants a couple of years ago and I’ve saved so much money since then. It’s easy to forget until they’re all growing like mad which is a bit too late, maybe we all need to setup a diary reminder!