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Sustainable gardening
Increasingly, gardeners want to reduce any negative impact on the environment from their activities. This applies equally to those who garden as a profession and those who garden at home. It’s a real challenge to know where to start but we thought we’d share some tips and ideas from the Trust’s gardens community, based on what they are doing themselves.
Get equipped sustainably
If you don’t have any tools, can you borrow some or buy second hand?
If you’re new to gardening, can you borrow some tools from gardening friends or family to get you started? They may even pass some along to encourage you! Keep an eye out for local tool pools which will lend them out, or you can probably pick up some second-hand tools online.
Repurpose plastic for labels or use alternatives
Labels are handy when sowing seeds and growing on young plants. Almost any light-coloured or plain plastic sheet can be cut up for this purpose – for example, an old yoghurt pot or similar. A soft pencil is a good way to write the names on, as it can be over-written another time.
We often use short wooden stakes in our vegetable gardens and write on them – the ink can be sanded off so the stakes can be reused another year. Slates are good too – and stylish! You can buy these online, recycled from old roofing material; they will last you for decades.
Make your own plant supports
If you need to prop up plants in the borders or vegetable patch, could you use pea-sticks instead of plastic-coated plant supports or mesh? Pea-sticks are short twiggy branches from birch or hazel trees, gathered when dormant (seeking the landowner’s permission first, of course!) and then stuck into the ground in spring to make natural supports. Some people weave long shoots of willow into beautiful upturned ‘baskets’ to perform the same function.
Top tip: love the weeds!
What is a weed? It’s largely in the eye of the beholder and often depends on what you are trying to achieve. If sharp lines and formality are your style – like in our lower parterre at Pitmedden Garden – it can be harder to relax your approach.
But if your preference is for looser, flowing borders, some native or long-naturalised plants can fit beautifully into a garden. Examples include wild carrot or sweet cicely in a border, and fairy foxglove or wall rue in a wall.
Make sustainable planting choices
Only use peat-free growing media
Often also referred to as compost, growing media is the material you usually purchase in bags for seed sowing, as grow-bags, for filling tubs or for potting-on. As an organisation, we campaign actively to protect and repair Scotland’s peatlands, both for nature and as a carbon sink, so we encourage all gardeners and growers – professional and domestic – to move away from peat in growing media.
We have not used peat-containing growing media in Trust gardens for decades now, so our gardeners are well-versed in the positives and negatives of the alternatives. Variability is the biggest challenge because manufacturers sometimes struggle to find steady supplies of their ingredients. As a result, we often just make our own – from mixes of garden soil, leaf mould and home-made compost.
Buy locally grown plants, if you can
Many wholesale nurseries, and almost all large chain garden centres, will truck their plants all the way from the European continent (or further), where they will have started life growing in peat-based compost and likely in a heated glasshouse.
However, some businesses in Scotland, including some Trust gardens, grow their own plants for sale on a small scale, and it’s worth seeking them out to support them. Buying UK-produced also reduces the risk of importing a new pest or disease to the UK.
Grow your own fruit, vegetables or herbs
If you have space to grow your own produce, it can be very rewarding and saves on food miles too. Take a look at where your favourite edibles come from – you might be surprised how much is flown in from abroad. Can you grow some of that?
Or try growing something new and different that adds interest to your meals – for example, herbs for cooking, or annuals like nasturtiums with edible leaves and flowers. You can’t get fresher than what you grow yourself.
Top tip: do less digging!
Excessive digging over time can turn soil structure into virtual soup, and even forking-over releases carbon to the environment too.
You will see a lot less cultivation going on in Trust gardens these days as many follow ‘no-dig’ practices – avoiding a lot of sore backs as well! We’re layering on organic material instead and seeing a rise in productivity.
Ways to recycle in the garden
Gather autumn leaves to turn into leaf mould
At some point in horticultural history, neatness became the gold standard for beds and borders, with all dead leaves to be swept away. We now know that much of that labour has been counterproductive for the health of our soils. By leaving some leaves on the soil surface, it encourages earthworms, who pull them down to feed the soil flora and, in turn, our plants.
Leaf mould is a particular type of compost made only from leaves. We gather them from lawns in autumn and pack them down into a dedicated compost bay or into a large mesh ‘basket’. Then, we let time and nature do their thing. By the next year, the leaves will have broken down into gorgeous material for growing, so prized it is sometimes referred to as black gold! The longer you leave it, the better it gets.
Cardboard (or layers of newspaper) is an effective weed suppressant
Cardboard from big boxes makes an amazing mulch, especially if you take the plastic tape off and spread a few centimetres of herbaceous shreddings, woodchip or even grass clippings on top. This helps to weigh it down, discourages weeds and encourages the worms to work hard. Thick layers of newspaper work in a similar way.
This is a good technique if you feel you have lost control of the weeds in a border or veg patch – we find a lack of light helps weaken even tough weeds.
Avoid buying new pots and trays – be creative with alternatives!
When it comes to needing new plastic pots or trays, do you really need to buy them? Row upon row of uniform pots in a glasshouse or polytunnel can satisfy a liking for order, but old yoghurt pots with a few holes cut into the bottom can do much the same job.
Or consider buying or making wooden seed trays – an idea from the past – which can be reused year after year; a few Trust gardeners do this and find they work just fine for germinating seeds. Cardboard tubes from kitchen and toilet rolls are good for sowing too – especially suited to starting sweet peas. You can even make your own paper pots from newspaper.
Top tip: grow for success
If growing edibles is your ambition, try to maximise your output by specifically growing varieties that do well where you live. This means doing your research by asking around, looking online or visiting a local Trust garden to see what we do.
Although the climate is changing, there is still no point growing aubergines unprotected outdoors in Scotland, for example!
Gardening with nature to reduce negative impact
Cut less grass
While grass can help lock up carbon, lawn care can tip the balance the other way. In the Trust’s gardens we’re actively reviewing how much grass we cut, and how often we do it. We’re always looking for positive outcomes for nature, so will be carefully monitoring any changes.
When you do mow, can you set your blades a bit higher so that low flowering plants like selfheal and clover make it through the cut to feed the bees? Let the clippings fall back onto the surface rather than collecting them. Or perhaps you can set aside an area to let the grass grow long. You might even think about having a smaller lawn or no lawn altogether, planting the space with trees and shrubs.
Switch to electric or battery-powered equipment
We’re using battery-powered equipment in Trust gardens all across Scotland now when older kit retires. The small petrol engines of mowers, strimmers and hedge cutters can emit proportionately far more greenhouse gas emissions than their larger cousins in cars. Switching to electric and battery-powered equipment, while not perfect, is much cleaner in operation.
Avoid pesticides
Applying pesticides can have unintended and unwanted consequences for nature and the environment, particularly if applied repeatedly over years. There are some circumstances where pesticides are hard to avoid – herbicides used to prevent the spread of invasive non-native plants for example, which is a legal obligation. But where we’ve managed to move away from pesticides altogether, our gardeners report much greater biodiversity around them. Their gardens may suffer from the odd aphid, but those aphids feed the birds ... and we love the increased birdsong, as do our members and visitors.
Plant a tree
One of the most positive and hopeful things we can all do is to plant a tree. This will provide ecosystem services for decades, helping to capture carbon, reduce pollution and create a habitat for wildlife.
It’s important to plant the right kind of tree in the right place though – the last thing you want to see is it being cut down because it was too big for the space you put it, deemed ‘in the way’ or not valued by the landowner. There are many organisations, including the National Trust for Scotland, that plant trees and woodlands with an eye on their long-term life, secure for generations to come. We can even plant a tree in memory of someone for you.
Top tip: encourage garden wildlife
Don’t rush to cut down herbaceous plants with seedheads after they flower – they leave a wee winter larder for birds when times are tough.
There are so many ways to garden more sustainably. But if you are struggling to know where to start – just start somewhere! Remember, every step you take will help the environment we live in, and gardening is good for us all!
And our garden teams are always happy to chat and share ideas – come along and pay us a visit.
Sustainable gardening
Read more
Sustainable gardening: 10 ways to get equipped
Here are some tips and ideas from the Trust’s gardens community on how to get started.
Sustainable gardening: 10 ways to get growing
Here are some tips and ideas from the Trust’s gardens community on how to grow sustainably.
Sustainable gardening: 10 ways to recycle
Here are some tips and ideas from the Trust’s gardens community, based on what we’re doing ourselves.
Sustainable gardening: 10 ways to embrace nature
Here are some great ways to garden with nature – and reduce your negative environmental impact.