Eco Friendly House And Garden

Why Not Make Even More Out Of Your Eco Friendly House And Garden This Year?

Rather than just living in your house as normal - why not consider a few of these ways to no only improve the eco friendly qualities of your home - but to make it work for you too.

I mean, why should a house just sit there doing nothing? Make it more useful than it already is by making some small changes or concessions….

Here are a few ideas for you to consider with regards to ’sharing’ your home with others for the benefit of others - as well as your bank balance in some cases!

Empty Rooms Are A Waste:
Even if you turn of all heating and seal up all windows - an empty room is a waste of resources!

It’s already in a home filled with energy and bodies - so why leave rooms empty when you could make them work for a living and keep the worlds ‘footprints’ smaller - after all, the more people living in the same house can save on so many levels!

If you aren’t into a full time tenant and live in a busy town or city, why not consider a Monday-to-Friday tenant instead. No huge commitment, less belongings and they are usually a reliable adult too!

Or the other end of the extreme - if your house is too big for you but you don’t want to downsize for whatever reason, then why not eco renovate and create a self contained unit in the basement or whatever and rent this out as as a permanent let or holiday home depending on your location.

Hotel Rooms Even More So:
Why not treat your home as a swap for a hotel room - either as a holiday for yourself or while you are away.

Firstly, you could take a holiday swap this year instead of booking a hotel. let a family move into your home while you go live in theirs! Not everyone is looking for an equal swap either - you might get a cute cottage for your family home, or a spacious farmhouse for your city flat!

Secondly, if you live near a local attraction or event (like Wimbledon or a show ground) then why not time your holidays to coincide with a huge demand for lettings! Signing up with an agency could bring you up to £2000 a week depending on your home and the event you are close to!

Parking Spot Or Tennis Court?
Same goes for the outside of your home - why not rent out unused space to others at virtually no cost to you or really any effort either!

If you have land that people could park on and you live in a busy location - why not let someone park there? You aren’t using it - and they probably waste time and petrol every morning looking for a spot!

And the same goes for your tennis court, trampoline, pool, piano, climbing frame or anything else you have sitting around that you aren’t using 24 hours a day. You might not want to charge your closest friends - but a few quid for a game of tennis for some young kids or keep-fit oldies won’t go amiss - basically paying for it’s own maintenance.

Your Skills Too:
It’s not just physical things that can help out others and bring in a few extra pounds - what about your own skills?

Music lessons, language lessons, discussion groups, Body Shop parties and product research groups. All could use your skills and your lounge, conservatory or kitchen - and of course - you!

Or if you are on a country walk or in a cute village, why not sell cakes and tea or garden veg and flowers in your front garden for passers-by!

House In The Country

Get Your Home On TV!
If you live in a city, your home has a great garden, great views or great architecture, or you have some great internal features - you could ‘model’ your home!

Let a photo or TV agency know about it and you could rent your house and garden out for magazines, TV or even movies!

You don’t even have to do anything, they set it all up and then take it all away again - pain free and you won’t be in any of the shots - unless you want to be!

Make some time to go to a show to get some top tips for your eco friendly house and garden!

The whole show doesn’t have to be uber green - just on the right theme, and then you can go and pick out the bits you like and put pressure on the companies that are not offering what you want!

Many tips and tricks for home redecorating or garden landscaping don’t have to be new-fangled and complicated - there are many things that we can do that are eco friendly without even trying!

Also at shows, you get to see products that aren’t found in supermarkets due to their ‘rules’ on listings, like biodegradable toiletries, organic foods and fair trade supplies.  You just won’t find these on the high street - so they bring them to the shows so you can get hands-on experience with them rather than blindly ordering things off the Internet!

1) The National Home Improvement Show - Earls Court, London
With over 18 exhibitors being from energy efficiency companies and talks and seminars from environmentally active lecturers and TV presenters - you know you could be on to a good thing here!

Take your pick from all the departments including renovations, kitchens, bathrooms and gardens as see if you can get some great advice on using the right resources, getting eco friendly appliances and other homewares as well as sustainable produced garden furniture and buildings.

2) The National Wedding Show - NEC, Birmingham
If you are even remotely thinking of getting married - then you must consider a trip to a wedding fair.  Weddings can cost at least £20,000 for a simple affair - so if you are after an eco friendly wedding, then you had better plan in advance to make sure that you get the best products and services booked up in advance - rather than have to settle for second best when you run out of time!

And, there are bound to be things involved with a wedding that you hadn’t really even considered looking in to like car hire and tablecloths!  At a show like this - they have already done all the thinking; just turn up with a notepad and pen and comfy shoes!

3) Mind, Body & Soul 2010 - Olympia, London
Take a day out to unwind from the stresses of life - and try out some of the great relaxation remedies, complementary therapies and practical sessions.

Find yourself surrounded by experts on stress, therapy, yoga and many other well known and well used techniques that could help you realise your potential and make some serious changes in your life, your work or your free time.

Raised Garden

4) Grand Designs Live - NEC, Birmingham
Covering everything from food to flowers, lofts to landscaping and from sash windows to sustainable sheds!

Seriously, it’s not just about buying a plot of land or derilict church and building a massive monstrosity on it like the earlier Grand Design TV Shows - its all about making things better, more eco friendly and long lasting - and not just for 1 home - but for whole communities.  

5) The Baby Show - Earls Court, London
Come here and find out about everything you will need for your little one before they arrive - and for your growing ones who need some new inspiration and equipment - or for yourself to help cope with the new lifestyle that is shaping your every day life.

Not only will your get the chance to try out all the existing products that are new to you - there will also be innovative products and companies out there with something new to the whole world!  Whether it’s a new eco friendly material, new biodegradable toiletries or organic baby foods - you can bet that it is all here!

So, what are you waiting for - make some space in your diary….

National Family Week (UK) runs from May 31st to June 6th - but make yours and eco friendly one!

The event is all about celebrating Family and your time together - either indoors surrounded by books and films or outside knee-deep in grass and surrounded by bird song!

But there is no reason why your events can’t be green, local and without creating enough waste to fill your entire bin!

There are many events being held around the country that are on the official website, but why not use their guide to make a week of eco friendly fun for yourself your family and your friends.

The weeks events are running along a sort of ’schedule’ to help give people a rough plan if the week, and you can do as little or as much as you like - or create your own eco fun, but the week is as follows:

Monday - Eco Friendly Picnic:
Why can’t you arrange an event where you make an old fashioned outdoor feast, with local or organic produce brought in bulk - rather than everything in it’s own tiny bottle or individual wrapping.  Why not get one person to bake an enormous cake, one to bake a loaf of fresh bread, one to chop homegrown salad and bring home-laid hard-boiled eggs for the filling. 

Buy huge bumper packs of crisp and nibbles to share out and bring all fully reusable plastic plates and bowls to take home after.  And don’t forget some tubs to collect wild blackcurrants or fallen apples in!

Tuesday - Family Film Day:
Why not extend the picnic theme indoors with a great matinee of one or two of the families favourite films - make sure one is a classic musical to get everyone singing and dancing.  Before the first film, maybe all spend time in the kitchen mixing pastry and cakes so that when the film is over there is plenty of home-made food for everyone to tuck into before the next film!

Wednesday - Great Story Telling Day:
Rather than read other peoples stories - why not spend this day surrounded by scissors, glue and old magazines with a selection of pens and string - and have everyone create their own great adventure story from all your old magazines and bits of the outdoors like pressed flowers and leaves!  Something they can take away and keep.

Thursday - Green Road Trip:
Car or minibus, it doesn’t matter - but if there is an adventure to be had getting there is half the fun.  Rather than take the straight route - why not find the country lanes that go through tiny villages, steepled churches and fields of cows and horses.  Maybe even take in a ruined castle or 2 on the way as well - and don’t forget the camera and a tasty home-made packed lunch!

Friday - Eco Friendly House Party:
Anything goes here - whether it’s literally a party that goes on all night (without annoying the neighbours of course) or whether it’s a day-time party where people bring their family and some tasty goodies to share.  Or maybe help out with some spring cleaning or reducing and recycling.

Take one room of your home that really needs a sort out and get everyone involved. Whether it’s taking stuff to the recycling centre, community furniture project or around a friends - many hands make light work! Maybe get together to help an elderly relative or neighbour - or just your own home and ring some green changes!

Saturday - Eco Garden Fun:
Maybe this one could be an eco garden house party, where you all take it in turns to attack someones garden for the better, laying hedges, creating a wildlife pond, a bug corner, putting up bird feeders or just planting some veg! Things you never really get round to yourself - especially with the kids under your feet! Imagine to things you could achieve with 10 people instead of just you and your mum!

Whatever you choose to do, I hope you have fun - and maybe send in some photos!
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These little critters will eat 100’s of garden pests and help to pollinate 1000’s of plants.
 
By encouraging these little understood bugs into your garden could really improve your success in the plant world, helping to kills off pests, help generate seeds and fruits throughout the year.

So lets find out about these very different little insects and see what they can do for us - and what we can do for them.

Bumble Bees:
These are the first things we think of when we talk about bees, and we often see them in the garden as a big, furry bumbling bee, humming loudly as it moves through the plants in our yards.

Bumble Bee

These bees are not kept in hives and actually live in holes in the ground, compost heap, disused bird houses or old trees.  At the end of the summer the queen is mated and heads of alone to live out the winter before producing offspring the following spring.

She generates plenty of offspring and a colony could number up to 300 individuals as it lives out the summer feeding on and pollinating our garden plants and trees.

They have a sting, but rarely use it.

Honey Bees:
These are the ones that are kept in hives and produce plenty of honey - which bee-keepers use for human consumption.  They don’t need human intervention and can make their own hives in trees and roof spaces if necessary.

They are similar in shape and size to wasps rather than bumble bees, but don’t have the pinched-in ‘waist’ of the wasp.

They always live in large colonies and cannot survive alone for very long.  They can, however, travel and arrive in your garden in a huge swarm of up to 20,000 individuals!  Quite a site to witness as they settle as one writhing mass on a tree or building.

They are rarely ever dangerous to humans unless you antagonise them - although they will sting you.  Experts can be called in to move the swarm quite easily to a less populated environment if you don’t want quite that many in your garden!

Solitary Bees:
The other types of bees live in loose groups but do not swarm or form colonies.

They are similar in appearance to honey bees, and can be used commercially to pollinate crops just like the more popular honey bees.

There are about 250 types on solitary bees in the UK, and many live in small holes in the ground but stay close to other solitary bees spread out over some distance.

Wasps:
Although they send us into a fear frenzy on site due to their habit of stinging us - they can be very beneficial to your garden or allotment.

The queen will set up a nest of mushy paper and fibres in the spring and start to produce larvae to build up her colony - which can reach 20,000 in a few weeks if the conditions are excellent!

Intricate Wasps Nest In Trees

Adult wasps eat nectar and sugary liquids, but they feed their young on insects, so can be seen feeding off plants and killing aphids too! 1 worker wasp could catch around 100 aphids a day off your plants to feed their young.

However, if the colony becomes too large the adults may require more natural food than your garden can supply and so they will turn to other sources - like our kitchen for jams, bee hives for honey etc. and this is when they come into conflict with humans.

But as with all the different bees, if you can tolerate them around your homes and gardens you can get yourself some free insect control and some free fruit and flower generation!

So what are you doing to encourage them to your garden?

It’s as simple as sitting in your own front room with a cup of tea watching the birds!

What could be a better way of finding out if your efforts to create an eco friendly wildlife garden are working than to record the wildlife that visits it?

Starting with the birds is the best way to start your surveying as they are the most obvious and easy to identify of your garden visitors during daylight hours!

Yes we can all identify a hedgehog and a fox, but you have to stay up late in the cold to do that! Birds come out when the sun is shining and you are wide awake! What could be easier?

Why Count Birds?
The RSPB survey takes place every year - as it has done since 1979.  Joining in this survey will not only help you to identify more and more of your garden visitors, but it will also allow you to take part in national efforts to record and protect our native species and migrant visitors.

It will also help you to gauge the avian diversity of your garden and local neighbourhood - and help you to choose your feeding sites and foods better; for example blackbirds generally feed on the ground, robins would like a bit of animal protein in their diet and blue tits would love some niger seed from a feeder!

If you know which species are around your garden, you can tailor what you offer them.  Not only will this help you attract those birds that you like to see, but could help you see a much wider variety of species throughout the year if you make a few changes.

The Survey:
Added to your own pleasure of watching the birds, you could also be helping the RSPB to extend their knowledge of species distribution and to watch out for serious changes in species number.  Some birds are key indicator species for certain habitats, so watching their numbers increase or decline could make a big difference.

And, the RSPB can’t be everywhere at one time - they rely on people like you and me to spare them an hour of their day at the end of January 2010 to count everyday birds. 

You don’t have to be an expert like Chris Packham or Bill Oddie - you just need to be able to count the most common birds in your garden.

The RSPB offer a guide to identifying some of the species that you are likely to see on their website - and a review of these and a few practice watches should help you to get the basics under your belt.

If you can tell a robin from a blackbird and a blue tit from a magpie then you are good enough!

And, if you want to get the kids involved at school, then check out the details for info packs and guidelines for schools!

I don’t mean badgers and sparrows - I mean plant diseases and pests!

We know that the quickest way to kill off diseases and pests in our gardens is to use chemicals - but that isn’t very eco friendly or organic.

There are alternative treatments, but they normally involve a lot of your time or money or result in dead or dying plants.

So, why not plan to never have the pests or diseases in the first place?

Planning Ahead.
Why not follow these simple guidelines to reducing the chances of anything untoward getting into your garden from the start!

The most likely way to infect your garden is to bring in plants from elsewhere. If you buy plants from garden fetes or charity shops etc, or find them in skips, you have got to expect the worst.

If they were loved and cared for in pristine conditions - people wouldn’t be selling them cheap or throwing them away, would they? So:

1) Use only local and reputable suppliers and nurseries
2) Only use the neighbours you know who care for their plants properly
3) Make sure the supplier or neighbour has been organic too!
4) Avoid semi-mature specimens from overseas - you just never know!

Plants on arrival:
Any plants, seeds or bulbs arriving in your yard should be carefully inspected to make sure they are healthy, especially if they are from a friend/fete/garden show/etc.

If you buy plants that are not looking healthy, you can’t expect them to be healthy - so only take on with care. If you are receiving a delivery of plants - check them too: don’t just look at a few - check them all - you are paying for them. There is no point paying for a plant that is diseased or infested.

Buying dodgy looking plants may be a cheaper way to get them - but won’t be so cheap if they need chemicals to recover, take an extra year to establish or flower, or worse: cause damage your existing plants!

Quarantine the new plants in a specific area away from any other plants or gardens for at least 2 but preferably 6 weeks. Many bugs and diseases can travel short distances so could easily infect neighboring plants if planted too soon.

And finally, make sure you don’t cross-contaminate the tools and equipment used for new plants. Disease can be carried on your tools and hands - so be fussy and make sure you clean everything.

I recently moved my plants to a new home and picked up a strange mite - which has all but killed a tropical plant of mine that took 6 months to germinate last year!

So Finally:
Find out what the common pests and diseases look like and what plants and conditions they prefer so you can spot the first signs of trouble - hopefully before you buy them!

Also, knowing the visual identification of garden pests and preferred conditions of certain diseases means that you can act fast at the first sign of trouble and save your plants - and all your hard work!

Welcome back, and I hope you are ready for more top tips for your eco friendly vegetable garden!

Moving on from just growing too many in the first place, these next 2 tips cover storage issues and gardening overload!

2)  Where can we put them all?
What could be more disappointing to the end of your growing season than to have runner beans (or whatever you grew too much of) going rotten in the fridge. 

Home grown crops - especially when grown organically - do not have the same shelf life as those brought from super stores.  They are not designed to stay fresh for a week or so for retail purposes, and if picked or dug out of the ground will only last a few days.

Yes, there are many veg that can be stored for months if you do it right, like potatoes and onions for example, but generally everything else needs to be eaten or preserved as soon as possible really - or given away to who ever will take them!

So, you need to learn which crops can be stored for a long time, those which can be frozen, veg that need processing in some way before storing, and which ones only have a short shelf life.  Then plan how many of each you can grow.

Many beans and peas can be blanched before freezing so as to increase the number of nutrients remaining in them, and others need a certain amount of other actions before they are ready for freezing or turning into preserves or chutneys, etc. 

You also need to make sure that you only freeze them in portion size amounts, otherwise when you want to eat them you have to take the whole lot out and smash off the amount you need to cook!

And do you have enough freezer space in the first place?  Most avid vegetable growers need another freezer to store all their summer veg to last them through to the winter!

Planning ahead is the key here - and if in doubt ask someone who is already growing their own crops what they do with all their veg!

3) What a waste of your land:
If you are turning over great swathes of your garden to vegetables because ‘that’s how many seeds there were in the packet’ then you are taking the fun out of your garden.

Imagine the kids playing ball and they keep tripping over plants and cane poles.  You want a few minutes to yourself on the patio but all you can see are plastic bottles and rows and rows of pots and mud!

You won’t get a moments peace either, as you will have so many crops to keep an eye on that you will constantly be out there checking on everything.  When you look out of your windows making your morning coffee - you’ll see something wrong with the plants, or something has fallen over or whatever.

You could end up out there on your afternoon off from work, tending to a huge number of plants that you might not even end up eating (see points 1 and 2).

The Answer?
Growing your own veg should be fun, and if you grow too much of one thing, then you lose that fun. 

Eating artichoke every so often is a nice treat, but when you always have another 2 in the fridge, it loses it’s speciality.  It’s not even fun to eat it anymore.

Also, if you know that you always have more of something growing outside, you may actually care less about each individual vegetable you have indoors.  For example, will you care if one parsnip goes rotten waiting to be eaten in the fridge if you have another 2 meters of them left outside to dig up?  No, you won’t. 

Too much of something actually tends to encourage waste as if you have so much - why does one matter?

This certainly wouldn’t be true if you had brought the parsnips. Every penny counts these days and you can see it when you have brought something yourself out of your wages.  But vegetables you have grown don’t seem to be worth anything, you don’t see the money and energy they have cost.

Your back yard vegetables aren’t free, so don’t treat them as such.  Value them as your time - and your time is worth more than money.

It really is a light for your garden powered only by the wind!

Imagine sitting outside in your garden or on your balcony and you are being mesmerised by your spinning light! Sometimes it is a solid tube of color and other times it is a pulsating spiral of energy!

How Does It Work?
Well, there are 14 LED lights embedded on the edges of the product which are powered by the spinning of the FireWinder in the wind.

The Firewinder itself is made of 100% recyclable materials and is moulded in the shape of a helix. This way it can catch the wind from any angle and any strength.

Any breeze over a few miles-per-hour will spin the helix around - giving the illusion of a rising edge and in daylight this is more like a mobile than a piece of cutting edge eco-technology!

However, what makes it light up are the 14 LED ‘bulbs’ or ‘patches’ spread out all up the outside edge of the spiral which are powered by the tiny turbines inside.

As it is the outer rising edge of the FireWinder that has the lights on it - when the wind picks up, these lights spin around really quickly forming a continuous band of rising light around the lamp: See Light Spinning.

In slower winds the light pattern is mesmerising and moves upwards around the FireWinder at differnt speeds, sometimes throbing in the breeze. But at higher wind speeds, the lights stay solid and so you will have a what appears to be a static column of light 14 bands high!

It really is something to just stare at for hours!

Is It More Of An Ornament Then?
I suppose you could say that. I mean it is not going to be bright enough for you to read books by or offer home security features - but it will be a welcome edition in gardens during those warmer summer months.

FireWinder is I think the first and only wind-powered outdoor lighting product - all the others on the market are solar-powered - and offer a less fun form of lighting! However, if you don’t get a lot of wind then you best opt for these!

One great eco-friendly product for garden lighting are the solar-powered ‘rock’ lights. As their name suggests, they are plastic ‘rocks’ that have a tilted and so hidden solar panal on the top. By day they look like a simple stone and by night they emit a quite powerful beam of light.

These come in a range of different sizes and offer a more continous and reliable solid light in the garden than the Firewinders, but are not so amazing to watch!

There are of course plenty of more light-looking solar powered lights for your garden - some white, some colored and even some color changing lights - but you can’t beat the spiral effect!

Did you know that honey bees make onions and carrots grow?

Bees pollinate a huge number of plants, fruits and vegetables, and help to improve the yields of so many others. So without them, there may be less, smaller or no fruit and veg for us to eat!

Don’t Plants Just Grow Themselves?
Well, yes. All plants will grow into an adult plant or tree from a seed in the right conditions, but most will not fruit without pollination.

Pollination is where the male parts (the pollen) are moved from one plant to another by a bee, another insect or the wind (the pollinator) and join with the female parts (the ova) and make the babies if you like - and the babies in this case are the seeds. Most seeds are normally encased in fruiting bodies like apples, pears or nuts.

So, if for example, you enclosed an adult apple tree in a bee proof environment - it would produce blossom - but not any apples. The apples only grow once the flower has been fertilised, and the apples then grow from where the flowers once were. No pollination = no fertilisation = no apples.

The same is true for any flowering plant.

Can’t Something Else Pollinate Our Food?
Well, yes of course - some are pollinated by a variety of birds, insects or mammals - and many by the wind, but certain plants have evolved over thousands of years to work best with just 1 or 2 types of pollinators.

You may have seen the incredibly long flower tubes that only certain birds can reach into to feed, or the incredibly intricate ways that plants transfer pollen onto butterflies heads. Did you know that some plants will only release their pollen if stimulated by vibrating bee wings!

We can stimulate pollination ourselves if necessary, but it takes a lot longer and is nowhere near as effective long term. There is for example a town in China where villagers have to rub feathers across all their pear trees to make sure that they produce fruit - as they killed off all their own bees with pesticides.

This is all well and good for 1 small location where everyone chips in a bit of time for their own rewards, but imagine how many people you would need, how much time it would take and how much money it would cost to pay people to pollinate - by hand - the 60 million almond trees in California alone?

And this is just one crop. We farm a tonne of other more important crops - all of which will suffer if there are no bees.

What Can I Do?
Firstly, you can make sure that you limit or stop your use of pesticides or garden chemicals for ever and garden more organically. Bees are insects and so an insecticide used to kill those pesky aphids could well be killing bees too as well as butterflies and ladybirds - and possibly even birds and mammals.

Ladybirds which eat poisoned aphids could build up the toxins inside themselves before getting eaten by birds and passing these poison on up the food chain to larger birds or mammals! So insecticides can poison sparrows, falcons and even domestic cats!

Secondly, make a home for them! Now I am not suggesting that you need to set up a hive - you can easily make a home for a single bee in a tree or a hole in the ground and help to encourage wild bees (domesticated bees in hives cannot survive without human help) into your garden.

Make sure you leave wild areas in your yard - and make sure it has flowering plants in it so the bees can eat the nectar. A garden filled with decking and concrete isn’t going to make a good home for any animal!

Wild bees are just as good if not better at pollinating some plants and foods, but they live singly or in much smaller groups and don’t always want to live in the same hive. Your garden could supply the next home for some travelling bees - helping to keep your plants alive at the same time!

Thirdly, you could support local bee keepers by buying local honey - after all - their bees could be helping to pollinate your garden and local parks. They could also be creating all the yummy fruit you keep buying from your local farm store!

Nationally, Hagen Daz have made a Vanilla Honey Ice Cream to help highlight the plight of the honey bee (bees pollinate vanilla orchids if you didn’t know). By buying some of this delicious product - I have tried it myself - you can help fund research into what is causing the massive bee losses across the world - and hopefully prevent the honey bee as we know it ceasing to exist.

As a result, you will be keeping (excuse the pun) all those apples, pears, melons, cherries, blueberries, pumpkins, carrots, onions, broccoli, soya beans, almonds and sunflowers on your table!

Tips On How to Create And Manage Your Environmentally Friendly Gardens.

There are many things you can do around your garden that can make it more environmentally friendly - and this doesn’t just entail dragging bath water in buckets to the garden or picking slugs off your plants under the moonlight!

More people are moving into their gardens to make a difference to their lives, either to enrich the wildlife they attract, or to grow their own food and rear their own chickens!

This article hopes to highlight a few things that you might not have thought of in your garden plans, and explains why they will benefit you and your family.

Weeding:
Try to make time to weed by hand - not only does this reduce your dependence on artificial and possibly toxic chemicals, it will also give you a little bit of exercise and allow your skin to produce some Vitamin D - essential for health!

Obviously you will need some tools to weed with - but try to use manual equipment to do so. Not only is is quieter (there’s nothing more annoying than finally getting out in the garden to enjoy a good book and next door start their leaf blower or hedge trimmer!!) but it uses less energy. No petrol or electricity is needed to use your favourite pair of shears!

If you do have an extensive lawn or plenty of hedges, etc - then large - and often expensive - equipment may well be required. But rather than buying it all yourself and then leaving it in the shed until next year - why not borrow or hire a neighbors. Some communities join together to buy ’shared’ equipment which you rotate through the group.

However if you do need these things - then it may well be cheaper to pay for a professional gardening company to do it once or twice a year for you, rather than buy, store and repair all your own items. This will then, of course, free you up some valuable time to do something more fun!

Avoid mowing your lawn in summer as young amphibians may well be killed.

Plants:
Make sure you don’t use peat products in your garden. Not only is it taken from a fragile and irreplaceable habitat - it is also a carbon sink - basically it is keeping all the carbon it absorbed years ago within itself. Digging it up releases this carbon into the atmosphere again - and I think we already have enough up there already!

Source local, native seeds if possible to limit invasive species gettting a hold here. Also local plants will be best suited to the environment you live in, therefore limiting their damage in terms of extra water demands and possible toxins if eaten by our native wildlife. Hopefully you will help to increase biodiversity with your choices and start to attract local species instead of killing them! Ideally, you would aim for the most drought-hardy versions of your selected plants where possible to reduce demands.

Ponds:
By putting in a garden pond, you could also attract frogs and toads who delight in eating garden pests! And you could also attract a whole host of other garden-friendly pest controllers with the mini wetland you create!

Ideally, you wouldn’t put fish in a wildlife pond as they may well eat insects, amphibians and their young. Also many products need to be used to keep the fish healthy including energy sapping filters and pumps (unless you install solar equipment) and these can go against the ‘eco-friendly’ grain so to speak. Having a few healthy fish at the expense of a delightful and welcoming wildlife pond teeming with local species and plants is your choice in the end.

Try to avoid to much fuss over the pond in summer as many creatures will be breeding and there will be young all around. You could throw them out if you start weeding!

Messy Area:
By making sure there is a part of your garden that is a bit dishevelled will ensure that more wildlife will find your garden a safe haven. Essential to attract is the humble bumble bee and you can do this by offering it a home in a hole close to the ground - they will help pollinate your plants and vegetables through the summer.

Your compost heap is an essential part of a sustainable garden - even if you are not growing your own veg. Plants can do very well on the composted result of your table scraps and dead leaves (it also saves a long drive to the amenity facilities to dump all your green waste too!)

Make sure you let nettles grow in a controlled area of your garden as well, as they are a great nitrogen fixer - making the earth beneath then become more fertile.

Ideally, your messy area and lawn should be proportionally larger than any paved or concreted areas, as these hard impermeable surfaces will increase rain run off during storms. As a result, it will divert valuable water away from your garden plants and send it (along with everyone elses run-off) into the drains and nearby creeks and streams. After long periods of heavy rain this could easily increase the risk of localised flooding as all the water gets to the waterways at the same time rather than slowly filtering through the ground first!

Pets:
Make sure that your pets are not causing a problem for wildlife or your garden. Cats for example catch mice and other small rodents which unfortunately is having a disastrous effect on bumble bees. These insects like to use old rodent burrows for their new nests, but if there aren’t any rodents digging the burrows in the first place - you can see the problem!

They also kill frogs, toads and wild birds.

Ducks are a tiny bit messier than chickens but they just love slugs and will eat them for you all day. However, they may destroy some plants along the way! Ducks will produce less eggs though if you were looking for a steady supplier!

Guinea pigs make great electricity-free lawn mowers and can keep grass down perfectly low if you rotate them around your garden in their spacious run. Rabbits also eat grass but will almost always burrow into your lawn creating a bit of a mess! Both will eat all the fresh table scraps you can offer and their bedding can be composted.

So, go get outside - and start developing you environmentally friendly gardens into something you can be proud of!!!